Online Video
In the past I've provided links to various types of music and video available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

An Educational Film Spoof Video called Big Fat Institute
---
http://www.bigfatinstitute.org/
This site is a Webby Nominee that is written up by Frank Ahrens, "An
Educational-Film Spoof And Other Webby Nominees," The Washington Post,
April 16, 2006 ---
Click Here

SOURCETEXT.com (with much emphasis on Shakespeare)
A home for specialized, reason-provoking texts that appeal to the eternally
curious and to those who value wit and character ---
http://www.sourcetext.com/

When Hitler was victorious
Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have
fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus
of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall
fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with
growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our
Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall
fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the
streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if,
which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were
subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded
by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good
time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue
and the liberation of the old. Sir Winston Churchill,
June 4, 1940- --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_ChurchillThe Entire Historic Speech (Audio) ---
MP3 - 2.6 Megs ---
http://www.fiftiesweb.com/usa/churchill-fight-beaches.mp3

A cold war stalemate arises when sane leaders are in charge of the red
phones:
Such as when Kruschev (not Castro) backed down in the Cuban Missile Crisis
But what to worry about? Iranian nukes? Nah, that's just some racket cooked
up by the Christian fundamentalist Bush and his Zionist buddies to give
Halliburton a pretext to take over the Persian carpet industry. Worrying
about nukes is so '80s. "They make me want to throw up. . . . They make me
feel sick to my stomach," wrote the British novelist Martin Amis, who
couldn't stop thinking about them 20 years ago. In the intro to a collection
of short stories, he worried about the Big One and outlined his own plan for
coping with a nuclear winter wonderland . . . Nothing to fear but the
climate change alarmists.Mark Steyn, "Nothing to
fear but the climate change alarmists," Chicago Sun-Times, April 23, 2006
---
http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn23.html
Also see "When Hawks Play Chicken: Mutually Assured Destruction
and Iran," by Michael Young, Reason Magazine, April 20, 2006 ---
http://www.reason.com/links/links042006.shtml

A cold war stalemate may not prevent nuclear winter when an insane
leader holds a red phone If the visit to Washington last week by the
head of Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, was not enough to communicate
Israel's growing impatience with the international community's failure to
deal with Tehran's unchecked development of nuclear technology and bellicose
threats to wipe the Jewish state "off the map," Ehud Olmert, prime minister
designate, made it clear yesterday by denouncing Iran's president as a
"psychopath" and comparing him to Hitler . . . Steinitz, who oversees
Mossad's activities in Iran, fears Iran's first nuclear bomb is just one
year away. "There is only one option that is worse than military action
against Iran and that is to sit and do nothing," he said . . . "Ahmadinejad
speaks today like Hitler before taking power," Olmert said. "So you see, we
are dealing with a psychopath of the worst kind — with an anti-Semite. God
forbid that this man ever gets his hands on nuclear weapons, to carry out
his threats." "Impatient Mossad warns of 'monster in the making',"
WorldNetDaily, April 30, 2006 ---
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=49984
Also see "Iran's psychopath in chief," London Times, April 30, 2006
---
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2158069,00.html

As has been projected for several years now, the
University of California for the first time admitted more Asian students
than white students this year, The San Jose Mercury News reported. As Asian
enrollments have gone up, many of the university system’s campuses have seen
racial politics and attitudes change. Inside Higher Ed, April 24, 2006
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/04/24/qt

UFF DA!!"There are too many farmers in Norway, we can
manage with half of those we have today. We can't just let people in the
outlying districts live on transfers and benefits," said Hans Frode
Asmyhr."Too many farmers The Progress Party (Fr.P), Norway's
largest in recent opinion polls, now says that the country has twice as
many farmers as it needs, "Aftenposten," April 24, 2006 ---
http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1291134.ece

Rep. Cynthia McKinney still does not know
whether she will face criminal charges for allegedly punching a U.S.
Capitol Police officer who stopped her at a security checkpoint. But the
Georgia Democrat is pulling no punches with the media, ordering an
Atlanta television station not to broadcast derogatory comments she made
about a member of her staff on Saturday.Jeff Johnson,CBS News ,April 24, 2006---
Click Here
Jensen Comment
Ordering suppression of news is a good way to call attention to it. When
will she learn?

A dead man sending off for a
mail-in ballot for the March primary was just one of the clues that
brought investigators from the Texas attorney general's office to Duval
County. Assistant District Attorney Jon West had only been on the job
for about three months when the voter fraud allegations started
surfacing.Corpus Christie Caller-Times,
April 24, 2006 ---
Click Here
Jensen Comment
So what's the big deal. It's a long-standing tradition in Duval County
to allow the dead to vote. It would be interesting to examine the return
address on the envelope.

Dear Mrs. Johnson, Susie was home sick
yesterday with vomiting and explosive diarrhea. Please be on the lookout
for any sudden recurrences.Erik Deckers, Excuses, Excuses, Excuse," The
Irascible Professor, ---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-04-20-06.htm

A 53-year-old German woman who was driving
her dead mother across country to save on mortuary transportation costs
was fined by police for disturbing a dead person's peace.Reuters, April 24, 2006 ---
Click Here

Grand Theories and Mid-Range Theories: Cultural Effects on
Theorizing and
the Attempt to Understand Active Approaches to Work
MICHAEL FRESE

PG.# 84 & 85 FRESE As is true of all human behavior,
theory building is based on environmental forces and on person factors. It
has been my curse and my blessing to be overactive. My overactive nature
led me to believe that it was good to be active and to be in control of
things. Therefore, I quickly embraced theories that seemed to correspond
with this prejudice. The three theories that seemed to encompass what I
stood for were Rotter's cognitive behaviorist theory (Rotter, Chance, and
Phares, 1972), Seligman's learned helplessness theory (Seligman, 1975), and
Hacker's action (regulation) theory (Hacker, 1973; Volpert, 1974). Both
Rotter's as well as Hacker's theories were indirectly related to a common
source: Lewin's influence in Germany and in the U.S. All my research
centered around the themes of an active approach to work-life (the opposite
of helplessness): Thus, I became interested in personal initiative as one
such instance of an active approach. Since an active approach means to
explore, I also became interested in errors and how one can learn from
errors.

PG.# 87 & 88 FRESE Our phenomenological orientation
towards errors allowed us to make a discovery: When people are permitted and
encouraged to make errors during training and are instructed to learn from
errors, they perform better after training than when they are hindered from
making errors. This was surprising because most software trainers and a lot
of theorists (e.g., Skinner and Bandura) had suggested otherwise: They
favored the avoidance errors because they considered errors were too
frustrating and inefficient for the learner, and that people would simply
learn the wrong things. Our so-called error training (later called error
management training) proved to be superior to other methods of training
people in computer skills (Heimbeck, et al., 2003; Ivancic and Hesketh,
2000; Keith and Frese, forthcoming).

Action theory argues that negative feedback is useful
(Miller, Galanter, and Pribram, 1960): Action implies a goal (some set point
that needs to be achieved). Until one has achieved the goal, a person
receives information that there is a discrepancy between the present
situation and the set point (achievement of the goal, e.g., a person wants
to travel to Rome and acknowledges that he or she is 500 miles away). Thus,
negative feedback presents information on what we have not yet achieved and
it provides guidance to action. Errors provide negative feedback but with a
specific twist: An error implies that the actor should have known better.
It is the latter that produces the problems of blaming people--both oneself
and others.

Therefore, we developed a training procedure (error
management training) which gave participants explicit instructions to use
errors as a learning device and not to blame themselves. Participants are
supposed to explore a system with minimal information provided; in contrast
to exploratory training, error management training tasks are difficult right
from the start, thereby exposing participants to many errors. Error
management training explicitly informs the participants of the positive
function of errors; these so-called error management instructions are brief
statements (we often called them heuristics because they allow us to deal
with the error problem) designed to reduce potential frustrations in the
face of errors: "Errors are a natural part of the learning processes!" "I
have made an error, great! Because now I can learn!" While participants
work on the training tasks, the trainer provides no further assistance but
reminds the participants of the error management instructions. When
comparing error management training with a training procedure that does not
allow errors, error management training proved to be more effective across
diverse groups of participants (university students as well as employees),
training contents (e.g., computer training, driving simulator training), and
training durations (1-hour training to 3-day training sessions), with medium
to large effect sizes (Frese 1995).

PG. #103 FRESE What have I learned from my journey as
a scientist who contributed both to a grand theory as well as to middle
range theories? The most important issue seems to me to have an open mind
to the quirks and difficulties, as well as to beautiful coping strategies
that people show in their environment--I think that curiosity and being able
to wonder and be surprised are the hallmark of good science. I am very
interested in concrete phenomena and I suggest one should become intensively
involved in real life phenomena (these may also be laboratory phenomena but
I, personally, have been more interested in those that constitute important
issues in society--not necessarily in my own society). It helps to
cultivate contacts across cultures and maintain contacts with various strata
in society--varied experiences support the process of being surprised,
stumbling across interesting phenomena, and of developing a wider net of
theoretical ideas and methodological approaches.

Good research questions often start with wonderment and
surprise. We then have to work on understanding experiences and phenomena
theoretically. For this it is helpful to look at the world like a theory
machine that attempts to understand all sorts of phenomena with theoretical
concepts. I remember that as students and young researchers my friends and
I used to apply theories like a 2-year-old takes a hammer: We continuously
attempted to use it to explain every phenomenon possible--in this way we
quickly stumbled across the limits of the usefulness of these theories and,
at the same time, we started to understand the theories better.

PG. # 104 & 105 FRESE In terms of methodology, I have
come to rely more and more on a combination of qualitative and quantitative
approaches. I use structured interviews because differential anchor points
are particularly problematic in any questionnaire research: What is high
planning for one owner may be complete chaos for another one. Structured
interviews are useful, not only because they showed excellent validity in
meta-analytic research (Hunter and Schmidt, 1996), but also because
interviews gave me a chance to probe owners' answers and to understand
precisely what they mean. Questionnaires sometimes "lead" participants to
certain answers. For example, it would have been "leading" to ask directly
for planning and activity within the questionnaire survey. This is
particularly true for cultural contexts in which it is improper to
contradict others and where there is a tendency to create harmony (as in
Africa). All of this speaks for interviews. At the same time, I want to
have quantitative data to test hypotheses and to confirm and falsify
them--therefore it is necessary to use coding procedures (I use very robust
ones--not complicated content analyses).

I should warn you, however. Not all of this writing
immediately gets translated into academic success. As a matter of fact, it
is my observation that some of the empirical articles that I am most proud
of (probably because they are dearest to my theoretical approach), have been
the most difficult to publish. My hunch is that they break with the typical
approach to doing things and, therefore, invite criticism that reviewers are
only too glad to provide. On the other hand, those articles, that I am most
proud of, are also often the ones that have the highest impact. And that is
after all what we are interested in. We should never want to publish
something just because we need another publication (well...at least never
after we get tenure...). I usually was driven to work hard on publications
by the fact that I wanted to communicate something that I found to be
important. We should all want to shape and influence the development of
science and knowledge rather than just be a smoothly functioning particle of
a scientific machine.

Where are the male students?
Colleges are increasingly worriedabout the way their applicant
pools and student bodies are lopsidedly female. Much of
the discussion assumes that the problem (if it’s a
problem) is relatively recent.

A new study from the National
Bureau of Economic Research, however, suggests that the
enrollment patterns colleges are seeing today result
from much longer term shifts. In fact, the analysis — by
three Harvard University economists — suggests that but
for certain societal conditions that either favored men
or motivated men, the gap might have been present or
larger earlier.

The study
starts with a review of the long-term trends in gender
enrollment and notes a fact that has received relatively
little attention of late: Between 1900 and 1930, male
and female enrollments were roughly at parity. And
relatively few of the women enrolled (about 5 percent)
were at elite women’s colleges. About half were at
public institutions.

Citing a range of studies, the
Harvard economists suggest that women of that generation
— like women today — made calculated decisions about the
gains that would come from higher education. Significant
numbers were seeking careers, even with the knowledge
that careers and marriage were viewed as incompatible
both by would-be employers and would-be spouses. Others
were seeking to marry college-educated men.

A variety of factors led to the
relative growth in male enrollments in the following
periods. Significantly, those changes did not reflect
better academic preparation by men or any falling off in
college preparation by women. Among the factors cited
were the increase in bans on married women working, the
importance of the GI Bill as a source of funds for
college for veterans — the vast majority of them men —
returning from World War II, and the desire of a
subsequent generation of men to avoid the Vietnam War
draft by enrolling in college.

Looked at through this historic
perspective, the edge that men had for many years wasn’t
natural or based on academic achievement, write the
Harvard economists. They call their study “The
Homecoming of American College Women,” driving home the
point that the trends of today reflect a return of
women, not the emergence of women’s outstanding academic
performance.

The high point of gender
imbalance in favor of men came in 1947, when men
outnumbered women on campuses by a 2.3 to 1 ratio (a far
more lopsided imbalance than we are seeing today, when
women make up 57 percent of enrollments nationally).
Women achieved parity again around 1980 and their
proportions have since been growing. In terms of women’s
motivations, the arrival of the women’s movement
certainly played a factor, the authors write, as more
careers were open to women and women delayed or opted
against marriage and/or having children.

So why today’s imbalance? The
Harvard economists suggest several factors. One is that
changes in societal values have meant that more women —
across social classes — hold jobs for significant
portions of their adult lives, or their entire adult
lives. The wage differential between college-educated
and non-college educated woman has always been greater
than that for men, the authors write. Women are behaving
with economic logic by focusing more on college, since
they will spend more of their lifetimes working.

The other major factor they
cite is also very simple: Women do better in high
school. They are more likely to study hard, to take the
right courses, and to do well in those courses than are
their male counterparts. Male high school students are
more likely to have behavioral problems.

A week ago,
new data on faculty salaries
showed that professors’ pay fell behind inflation for
the second year in a row. A month ago, when a federal
commission studying higher education released a paper on
reasons that college costs so much, it identified
professors —
their power and tenure— as a
prime culprit.

Feeling
underappreciated and under siege? Does
your job feel unstable?

There’s a reason,
according to two of the leading scholars
of the professoriate. They have just
finished what experts are calling a
landmark study of the professoriate,
which argues that we are experiencing “a
revolution” in academic life that will
be equal in its lasting significance to
such events as the importation of the
research university model to the United
States in the late 19th century or the
“massification” of higher education
after World War II.

“Seismic shifts
are profoundly changing how knowledge is
acquired and transmitted,” and while it
is unclear where these changes will lead
the academy, it is certain that faculty
jobs are changing — and changing in a
big way. That is the central thesis of
The American Faculty: The Restructuring
of Academic Work and Careers,by Jack H.
Schuster and Martin Finkelstein, just
published by Johns Hopkins University
Press.

Many of the
themes of the book won’t shock anyone
who has been working in academe lately.
Among them:

The pace
of change has accelerated
dramatically. While new models in
higher education historically have
taken decades to establish
themselves, today’s changes are
having nationwide impact very
quickly after they emerge.

Government
and the public have come to think of
higher education as an industry with
a key role in the economy, not as a
separate entity that should be left
to itself.

The
faculties and student bodies of
colleges are much more diverse than
they used to be.

There has
been enormous growth in the use of
part-time faculty members, and far
greater growth rates for those jobs
than for full-time jobs. Similarly,
full-time faculty positions off the
tenure track have grown.

Enrollments have moved away from the
liberal arts and toward the
professions, with a resulting shift
in faculty jobs.

All of these
trends are backed up with data. The
graphs, charts, and statistics come from
a variety of published sources (the
Education Department, foundations,
college groups) and aren’t new per se.
But the authors focus on long-term
changes, not the one-year increases that
tend to capture attention when new data
come out. Linked together over 555
pages, with analysis from Schuster and
Finkelstein, the information adds up to
more than the sum of its parts.

Two key points
that are likely to worry faculty members
is that the professorial career has
gotten more difficult — and that many of
the best and brightest are looking
elsewhere for employment.

In terms of
workload, the authors cite data, for
example, that show that the average
weekly hours worked at their institution
by full-time faculty members is up to
48.6 — from just over 40 in 1984. But
digging more deeply into the data, the
authors found that the percentage of
full-time faculty members who work more
than 50 hours a week has doubled since
1972 — reaching nearly two-fifths. And
the percentage of faculty members
working more than 55 hours a week has
grown to 25.6 percent from 13.1 percent.
And these, of course, are full-time
faculty members, not those who must
shuttle from campus to campus in unpaid
commuting time.

With faculty
members working long hours, wages
falling behind inflation, and changes in
the full-time/part-time ratio meaning
considerably less job security, an
important concern is the quality of
those entering the professoriate. Here,
the book finds very mixed conclusions.
Surveys of graduate programs and hiring
committees indicate a very high quality
of applicant (and plenty of them, in
some cases a clearly overflowing pool).

But the book
also notes a variety of surveys of the
career plans of the kinds of people
colleges might hope are considering
careers in academe, and their numbers
are dwindling. The book examines a
series of surveys of the career
aspirations and finds that academe isn’t
what it once was. Declines have occurred
in the percentage of Rhodes Scholars,
Luce Scholars, Watson Fellows, Phi Beta
Kappa members, and entering college
students over all who aspire to a career
in teaching.

While the
figures may be discouraging, the book’s
tone is not one of complaint, but of
drawing attention to how dramatic
various changes are.

Finkelstein,
one of the authors and a professor of
education at Seton Hall University,
calls himself an optimist and says that
the jury is still out on whether the
changes outlined in the book will make
higher education better or worse. “If
you look at this from the perspective of
what the faculty role has been like from
the ’50s, this doesn’t look
encouraging,” he said. But Finkelstein
added that professors of earlier
generations looked at the changes around
them and worried about the profession
becoming less desirable, and that didn’t
happen.

While there is
less job security, “there are different
kinds of opportunities today,”
especially through distance learning,
that didn’t exist before, he said.

And he sees one
of the major conclusions of the work
being that you can’t talk any more about
the faculty job — since it has evolved
in so many directions. “Historically,
the model was that everyone did the same
thing,” he said, adding that while the
relative proportions for teaching,
research and service might differ at
different kinds of institutions, the
basic job duties were similar. “I think
that model is falling away,” he said.

The other model
he sees these trends changing is one
where a young faculty member would seek
an institution at which to build a
career. The trends related to employment
patterns mean that more and more faculty
members will need to be mobile and
flexible.

Whether these
changes are good or bad isn’t clear,
Finkelstein said, even though many in
academe think otherwise. For example, it
is taken as a given by many that the
growth in the use of part-time
professors hurts students because,
however hard adjuncts work and however
thoughtful their lectures, they can’t be
physically present on campuses so
students can drop by, or serve on
curricular committees, or have influence
in the college equal to their teaching
role. All of that might be true,
Finkelstein said. But those who
criticize the reliance on part-timers
assume that the alternative is more
full-time slots. What if that’s not the
case, and the alternative is untaught
sections and the remaining students are
either turned away or squeezed into
larger and larger sections?

Finkelstein
said that he hopes the book will
encourage a research agenda that might
explore such issues.

While
Finkelstein might appear to have a
comfortable perch from which to talk
about all of the change in higher ed —
he is a tenured professor — he knows
something of what it means to shift an
academic career. He was going after a
Ph.D. in medieval literature in the
early 1970s at Columbia University, when
he decided the job market was bleak. He
switched gears to studying higher
education, earning a Ph.D. from the
State University of New York at Buffalo
in 1978. He started off the tenure
track, at the University of Denver, and
his position was eliminated when the
university faced budget problems. So
Finkelstein said he understands that
these trends aren’t academic, but affect
many people’s lives.

Schuster,a
professor of education and public policy
at Claremont Graduate University, has
worked as both a scholar and
administrator. Looking at academic
careers today, he said that “there have
never been guarantees of course, nor
should there be. But in prevailing
market conditions that in many fields
are not especially favorable to new
entrants, the likelihood is surely
slimmer for carving out a ‘traditional’
career.”

An academic
career still has many great advantages,
he said, and some of the surveys cited
in the book show that faculty members
who do establish themselves feel good
about their jobs. So the “prize” may
still be worth going for, he said. To
some extent, he added, academe may
benefit because no one has it good —
doctors and lawyers also complain about
conditions not being as supportive as
they were in the good old days. “Even if
the conditions of academic work are not
as rosy as they may have been, the
competing professions for top talent
appear not as attractive as they once
were,” he said.

In The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer
writes “the way we diagnose our students’ condition will determine the kind
of remedy we offer.” Diagnosing the condition that stands between students
and their learning can be the most difficult, and most rewarding, aspect of
teaching, but it takes that dual mind. The ability to observe how students
are learning in the midst of engaged interaction allows an educator to learn
what lies beneath the classroom persona, and to avoid the easy, derogatory
cliché that turns off both teacher and student from the successful
interaction of learning. What I hope my students learned that day was that
neither my mockery nor theirs was acceptable intellectual behavior, that
engaging in a discussion required respect from, and respect for, for all the
participants.
"Navigating Whitewater," by Amy L. Wink, Inside Higher Ed, April 25,
2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/04/25/wink

I am a Malaysian but currently teaching in
the UK. Please forgive me if I failed to express myself clearly in
English.

I just joined the discussion list months
ago and found a lot of useful information for both my research and
teaching career development. My sincere thanks to AECM.

As I plan to start my PhD study by end of
this year, I would like to ask for your help to get some references
to my research topic. I am interested in mastery learning theory and
programmed instruction; I'll research into the application of these
theories to accounting education. I aim to explore how the
accounting knowledge can be disseminated or transferred more
effectively to a large group of students.

Are there any useful databases or websites
that could help me to start with this PhD reseach? Is this research
topic outdated or inappropriate for me to proceed further?

One of the most extensive accounting education experiments with
mastery learning took place under an Accounting Education Change
Commission Grant at Kansas State University. I don't think the
experiment was an overwhelming success and, to my knowledge, has not
been implemented in other accounting programs:

Stay Clear of Foreign LotteriesThey say you can't win if you don't play, but when
it comes to foreign lotteries, you'll definitely lose. Americans lose tens
of millions of dollars this way each year.
Elizabeth Leamy, "Don't Get Fooled by Foreign Lotteries," ABC News,
April 14, 2006 ---
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Business/story?id=1897591&page=1&gma=true

After a widely followed study earlier this year
cast doubts on the benefits of calcium for bone health, women have been
wondering what to do with their calcium pills. Throw them out or keep
taking them?

A new calcium study published today, along with
new insights from the earlier research, are starting to clear up the
confusion. The verdict: Calcium works, but only if you take it
regularly.

The latest calcium news comes from an
Australian study of 1,460 women older than 70, reported in today's
Archives of Internal Medicine. In their main finding, the Australian
researchers say there was no statistically significant benefit to using
calcium. However, that's not the end of the story.

It turned out that only 57% of the women had
continued to take their pills during the five-year study period. When
researchers looked at just the women who did consistently take calcium,
there was actually a 34% reduction in overall fracture risk. That
finding reinforces other data that have shown consistent use of calcium
really does help women lower their risk for fractures, a significant
health risk for aging women.

"It was a bit of a surprise and a bit
disappointing to discover that the effect was so dependent on
compliance," says study author Richard L. Prince, associate professor at
the School of Medicine and Pharmacology at the University of Western
Australia. Patients need to make their calcium regimen a life-long habit
"to get the full treatment effect."

Typically, looking just at study participants
who take their pills can be misleading because those people might be
more health-conscious and healthier to start with. The Australian
researchers analyzed the data and found that there were no meaningful
differences in the health status of the calcium users and the placebo
group who took their pills consistently. That means the lower risk of
fracture shown in the calcium group likely was real.

What's so striking about the latest calcium
study is how similar it is to some of the data that emerged in February
from the calcium study of the Women's Health Initiative. The main
finding of that study, which involved 36,000 postmenopausal women, also
was that calcium offered no real benefit to bone health. The results
sparked widespread news stories questioning whether postmenopausal women
should adhere to federal guidelines recommending 1,200 milligrams of
daily calcium.

But WHI researchers now say the data have been
largely misinterpreted by the public. Although the overall group didn't
benefit, the results were skewed by the fact that the study included
women under 60, who generally aren't at risk for fractures. Many women
in the placebo group were taking calcium supplements on the side. By the
end of the study, only 59% of the women were consistently taking the
study pills.

All of these problems clouded the data, making
the trends that emerged in certain groups even more remarkable. Women
over age 60 in the calcium group were 21% less likely to suffer a hip
fracture than women in the placebo group. The benefits were even higher
among just those women who took their pills regularly. Across all age
groups, those women had a 29% lower risk of hip fracture. And among all
age groups and compliance levels, women who weren't taking calcium
supplements before the study lowered their hip fracture risk by 30%. A
hip fracture is a serious health concern that almost always requires
surgery, and can lead to permanent disability and even death.

"I heard women saying, 'That's it. This study
says [calcium] isn't important and I should throw them out,'" says
Andrea LaCroix, professor of epidemiology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer
Research Center and co-author of the WHI calcium study. "But that's the
wrong take home message. I think there are so many things about this
trial that support the guidelines to get at least 1,200 milligrams a
day."

Like many people with back pain, Ray Lagger, a
neurosurgeon in Mountain View, Calif., prefers low-impact exercises like
swimming. But Dr. Lagger takes extra steps to minimize strain: He wears
a mask and snorkel to avoid lifting his head out of the water
repeatedly. He also uses fins to strengthen his legs without tiring his
back.

Dr. Lagger, who specializes in preventing and
treating back pain and injury, suffered a badly herniated disk two years
ago. Now he sleeps only on firm mattresses and avoids lying on his
stomach because it puts strain on the lower back. When traveling, he
puts pillows behind his lower back during flights for better lumbar
support.

For his older patients, Dr. Lagger recommends
calcium supplements to prevent osteoporosis, a serious disease that can
cause compression fractures in the spine.

He says back surgery should be a last resort
because the after-effects could cause chronic pain.

Paralysis Cure Worth Waiting For? It's hard to wait if you're
paralyzedTreatments for paralysis and other ailments in
foreign countries are tempting for those facing a lifetime of dependence on
others. But here's why it might be better to wait before jetting off to
China.
Steven Edwards, "Paralysis Cure Worth Waiting For," Wired News, April 24,
2006 ---
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70710-0.html?tw=wn_index_4

Question
Will daily working of crossword puzzles and similar mental exercise deter
the rate of cognitive decline in older brains?

If you thought recent clinical trials of
reduced-fat diets and breast cancer, or calcium/vitamin D and hip
fractures, were disappointing when the intervention failed to live up to
its billing, you haven't seen studies of whether mental training slows
the rate of cognitive decline resulting from aging.

The largest such study, called Active, was
launched in 1998 and is still going. It trained 2,832 adults, aged 65
years old to 94, in memory, reasoning or visual attention and
perception. Disappointment ensued. Though the trainees did better on the
skill they practiced, that didn't translate to improvement on the others
(memory training didn't sharpen reasoning, for instance).

Worse, when the trainees were tested years
later, performance fell more than it did in the untrained group,
according to a new analysis by Timothy Salthouse of the University of
Virginia, a veteran of studies on aging and cognition. That probably
reflects the fact that if performance rises it has further to fall, he
says.

But there is a larger issue. "There is no
convincing empirical evidence that mental activity slows the rate of
cognitive decline," he concludes from an exhaustive review of decades of
studies. "The research I reviewed is just not consistent with the idea
that engaging in mentally stimulating activities as you age prevents or
slows cognitive decline."

Many scientists, not to mention the rest of us,
believe it does. The "mental exercise" hypothesis has been around since
1920, and studies find that higher mental activity -- more hours per
week spent reading, doing crossword puzzles, learning a language or the
like -- is associated with better cognitive function. That has spawned
the idea that, to keep your brain young(ish), you should partake of
intellectual challenges.

But this logic has a hole big enough to drive a
truck through. Just because older adults who are more mentally active
are sharper than peers who are cognitive couch potatoes doesn't mean
mental activity in old age raises cognitive performances, let alone
slows the rate of decline. To conclude
that it does confuses correlation with causation.

Consider an alternative that is gaining
scientific support. Say you enter old age (by which I mean your 30s,
when mental functioning starts heading south, accelerating in your 50s)
with a "cognitive reserve" -- a cushion of smarts. If so, you are likely
to be able to remember appointments, balance a checkbook and understand
Medicare Part D (OK, maybe not) well into your 60s and 70s. But not
because your brain falls apart more slowly. Instead, you started off so
far above the threshold where impaired thinking and memory affect your
ability to function that normal decline leaves you still all right.

The Active study isn't the only reason
scientists are rethinking the use-it-and-you-won't-lose-it idea. In the
Seattle Longitudinal Study, older adults received five hours of training
on spatial rotation (what would a shape look like if it turned?) or
logic (given three patterns, which of four choices comes next?). As in
Active, people got better on what they practiced.

But seven years later, their performance had
declined just as steeply (though, again, from a higher starting point)
as the performance of people with no training, scientists reported last
year. That supports the cognitive reserve idea -- if you enter middle
age with a good memory and reasoning skills you stay sharp longer -- not
the mental-exercise hypothesis.

Even in the most mentally engaged elderly --
chess experts, professors, doctors -- mental function declines as
steeply as in people to whom mental exercise means choosing which TV
show to watch. Again, profs and docs enter old age with a brain
functioning so far above the minimum that even with the equal rate of
decline they do better than folks with no cognitive cushion.

Crossword puzzles do not live up to the hope
people invest in them, either. Age-related decline is very similar in
people whether or not they wrestled with 24 Downs, Prof. Salthouse and
his colleagues find in a recent study. There is "no evidence" that
puzzle fans have "a slower rate of age-related decline in reasoning," he
says.

Evaluating use-it-and-you-won't-lose-it in a
new journal, Perspectives on Psychological Science, he ends on a grim
note: There is "little scientific evidence that engagement in mentally
stimulating activities alters the rate of mental aging." He regards the
belief as "more of an optimistic hope than an empirical reality."

But don't write off mental exercise yet.
True, neither one-time training nor regular mental challenges such as
crosswords slow the rate of cognitive decline. But they do show that
"older adults can be made to perform better on almost anything they can
be trained on," says Michael Marsiske of the University of Florida, who
helped run the Active study. "We're still detecting differences seven
years after the training."

In practical terms, although mental function
continues to decline even after mental training, the latter can give old
brains enough of a boost that they nevertheless remain higher
functioning than untrained brains. A number of scientists think they
understand what kind of training provides the biggest, most enduring
boost. Next week, I'll look at their ideas.

Researchers led by University of Texas at
Austin neurobiologist Susan Bergeson analyzed gene expression data from
mice bred for their alcohol preference -- some were teetotalers, others
preferred a 10-percent ethanol solution in their water bottles. The
researchers examined gene expression across the entire brain of the
mice. They found that 3,800 genes differ in expression levels between
teetotaler and alcohol-loving mice. In particular, 75 of these genes
seem to be associated with the mice's penchant for more or less alcohol.
And 36 of the genes are in stretches of the human genome that have been
implicated in alcoholism.

The study combined research from scientists who
are members of an NIH coalition called the Integrative Neuroscience
Initiative on Alcoholism (INIA), and include researchers at the Oregon
Health Sciences University, the University of Colorado, Scripps Research
Institute, and the Indiana University School of Medicine.

Psychologists and geneticists hope that
information about a patient's genetic risk of alcoholism could provide
better-tailored treatments. "If you knew why [your patient] was an
alcoholic on the neurobiological level, that might help you," says
Jonathan Flint, a psychogeneticist at Oxford University's Wellcome Trust
Center for Human Genetics.

But so far scientists have been stymied by
alcoholism's complexity. "Alcoholism is at its root...almost a canonical
example of a complex genetic disease," says Robert Williams, geneticist
and professor of anatomy and neurobiology at the University of Tennessee
Health Science Center. Risk for alcoholism probably comes from several
different genes that each play a small part, he says, and an individual
alcoholic's disease is probably caused by different combinations of
these genes. This is likely the case because alcohol can interfere with
so many chemical pathways in the brain. While many addictive drugs, such
as cocaine, have a single target in the brain, ethanol is a "teeny
little molecule that can wriggle its way into every network [and] has
effects just about everywhere," says Williams.

Continued in article

How to digitize and organize the hundreds of old pictures in your
attic

Eastman Kodak showed off new technology Tuesday
designed to help shutterbugs deal with mountains of images accumulating
in their photo archives and on their hard drives.

New hardware and software still in development
digitizes old snapshots and extracts information from photos in order to
automatically organize them. Kodak declined to say when these
technologies will show up in products, although the interfaces appeared
rather polished during Tuesday's press conference, which marked the
fifth birthday of the company's EasyShare docking digital camera.

The first new technology, currently nicknamed
"Scan the World," is designed to digitize old photos quickly and easily.

Measuring Merit It's the kind of personal
attention that landed Wharton at the top of BusinessWeek's inaugural
ranking of the nation's best undergraduate business programs. But the
school's merits go well beyond that. To succeed in the ranking, which
incorporates five measures -- of student engagement, postgraduation
outcomes, and academic quality -- schools must be firing on all
cylinders. Clearly, Wharton is, landing in the Top 10 on four of the
five ranking measures. Small classes, talented faculty, top-flight
recruiting -- and a four-year format that allows its ultracompetitive
students to delve deeply into business fundamentals -- lofted Wharton to
the No. 1 position. "They are extremely accomplished students," Souleles
says. "It doesn't get any better."

Wharton celebrates its 125th anniversary this
year and for much of its history has been considered among the nation's
finest. Like many top schools, it has the best of both worlds: a
high-quality undergraduate business program and an MBA program ranked
No. 3 in BusinessWeek's 2004 "Best B-Schools" list. Indeed, nine of the
Top 10 undergraduate programs have highly ranked MBA programs as well.

In many ways then, Wharton's showing among the
undergraduate schools simply confirms its preeminent status. But the new
ranking also shows just how much good company Wharton has these days.
Schools that had never been thought of as top business programs, such as
No. 18 Lehigh University's College of Business & Economics, turn out to
deserve more recognition. And schools that have always enjoyed a solid
reputation, such as Emory University's Goizueta Business School and the
University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business, come in among
the top five -- and in many ways rival Wharton for the mantle of best
undergraduate B-school in America.

MBA-like Respect That fact underscores a
curious transformation that has taken place in higher education in
recent years. As the economy rebounded after the dot-com bust, students
have been drawn to college business programs, and recruiters, seeking to
ramp up their diminished ranks of middle managers, have followed. Under
increased pressure from students and recruiters, business schools have
revamped their offerings, putting more emphasis on specialized classes,
real-world experience, and soft skills such as leadership. Once a refuge
for students with poor grades and modest ambitions, many undergraduate
business programs now get MBA-like respect. For many graduates, these
programs are now so good that the MBA is almost beside the point, an
academic credential for career switchers and those with corner office
dreams but unnecessary for mere mortals.

The undergraduate business degree is now
clearly on the path to respectability. With 54% of employers planning
recruiting trips to undergraduate campuses in 2006 and undergraduate
hiring expected to surge by 14.5% -- its third consecutive double-digit
increase -- starting salaries for grads in all majors are rising. But
business majors have fared better than any other discipline, with
starting salaries up more than 49% since 1996, compared with 39% for
engineering students and 29% for liberal arts grads, according to the
National Association of Colleges & Employers. The typical business grad
now earns $43,313, about $8,000 less than engineering students can
expect. But for undergraduates at top schools, the average can easily
exceed $50,000.

Hot to Hire Even with rising salaries,
recruiters are relying on undergraduate degree holders to fill more
jobs. In just three years, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT ) has increased its
recruiting on college campuses, including some MBAs, by 60%. Defense
contractor Raytheon Co. (RTN ) plans to hire nearly 1,200 new graduates
this year, and 3 out of 4 will be from undergraduate programs. To keep
the talent pipeline full, Raytheon maintains close relationships with 26
campuses, assigning executives to each school to work with key
professors to identify the best job candidates. Even so, with Raytheon's
business growing at a double-digit clip, the company plans to recruit
from 120 schools this year, according to Keith Pedon, senior
vice-president for human resources.

It's not just Raytheon, either. When the Big
East career fair took place at New York's Madison Square Garden in
March, there were 81 companies pitching to 1,000 students, and
organizers had to turn away 50 more companies for lack of space.

For a better understanding of the shifting
landscape of undergraduate business education, BusinessWeek last year
undertook an extraordinary research project. The goal: to rank the best
college business programs in America. Among other things, the project
included a survey with Boston's Cambria Consulting Inc. of nearly
100,000 business majors at 84 of the best U.S. colleges and
universities, a second survey of college recruiters, and a third survey
of the business programs themselves. If one thing emerges from the data,
it's that the programs are, in a sense, all grown up and evolving in
ways that mimic the developmental arc of the MBA itself.

Like graduate B-schools, the undergraduate
programs are separating into two clearly discernible tiers, with the 50
programs in our ranking standing head and shoulders above the rest.
They're also dividing along the same philosophical split that now
partitions the MBA world. There are those, including many at or near the
top of the list, that are following a rigorously academic model, with a
heavy emphasis on economics, statistics, finance, and accounting.
Programs like Wharton's fall into this group, which generally do not
require -- or give credit for -- internships, even though many students
get them on their own. They also use MBA teaching methods such as case
studies, simulations, and team projects.

But at the great majority of business programs,
students are exposed to less business theory -- too little, in the view
of some experts -- and a heavy dose of practical training. A quarter
century ago, virtually every business program in America followed the
latter model. At top schools that's no longer the case. "What you're
seeing is a polarization," says Barbara E. Kahn, director of Wharton's
undergraduate business division. "This is different from what it was 25
years ago. It wasn't the academic experience it is today."

Few schools typify the scholarly approach more
than Wharton, which landed in the No. 1 spot largely on the strength of
its academic quality. But the same could be said for any of the schools
near the top of the list. At No. 2 University of Virginia's McIntire
School of Commerce, students said the two-year format left them two
additional years to explore the school's numerous offerings but made for
a tough course load in the junior year and a pressure-cooker atmosphere
in which many thrived. At No. 3 Notre Dame, rigorous classes requiring
teamwork skills and an intimate knowledge of economics, calculus, and
corporate strategy earned the school a high grade for teaching quality.
The curriculum works ethics into most classes, requires that half of all
coursework be in nonbusiness subjects, and emphasizes group projects.

One reason undergraduate business programs are
getting better is because the labor market is demanding it. To make
graduates desirable to recruiters, many business programs have begun
making changes. Several schools that had two-year programs, including
No. 21 University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business,
have begun admitting freshmen in recent years. Such moves permit
students to take demanding business courses earlier, making them more
competitive internship candidates. Students are eagerly embracing these
and other changes. When No. 15 Washington University's Olin School of
Business, a four-year program, began offering a career management
elective to sophomores in 2004, more than 70 students showed up, and a
second section had to be added.

. . . the Washington Post has a very
interesting look at another firm with high insider control but with much
less criticism: Google. By Allan Sloan in Monday's paper:

"Consider, if you will, the differing ways
the Street is treating the New York Times Co. and Google, both of
which have high-voting stock for insiders and low-voting stock for
regular old public shareholders"

So what's different?

"Stock price. Times Co. stock has been
setting new multiyear lows and is depressed even by the depressed
standards of newspaper stocks. Google, by contrast, is up about 30
percent in the past month and more than 400 percent from its initial
public offering price less than two years ago."

Harvard Novelist Says Copying Was UnintentionalKaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore accused
of plagiarizing parts of her recently published chick-lit novel,
acknowledged yesterday that she had borrowed language from another writer's
books, but called the copying "unintentional and unconscious." The book,
"How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life," was recently published
by Little, Brown to wide publicity. On Sunday, The Harvard Crimson reported
that Ms. Viswanathan, who received $500,000 as part of a deal for "Opal" and
one other book, had seemingly plagiarized language from two novels by Megan
McCafferty, an author of popular young-adult books.
Dinitia Smith, "Harvard Novelist Says Copying Was Unintentional," The New
York Times, April 25, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/books/25book.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Her Publisher is Not ConvincedA day after Kaavya Viswanathan admitted copying
parts of her chick-lit novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a
Life," from another writer's works, the publisher of the two books she
borrowed from called her apology "troubling and disingenuous." On Monday,
Ms. Viswanathan, in an e-mail message, said that her copying from Megan
McCafferty's "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings," both young adult novels
published by Crown, a division of Random House, had been "unintentional and
unconscious." But in a statement issued today, Steve Ross, Crown's
publisher, said that, "based on the scope and character of the similarities,
it is inconceivable that this was a display of youthful innocence or an
unconscious or unintentional act." He said that there were more than 40
passages in Ms. Viswanathan's book "that contain identical language and/or
common scene or dialogue structure from Megan McCafferty's first two books."
Dinitia Smith, Publisher Rejects Young Novelist's Apology," The New York
Times, April 26, 2006 ---
Click Here

Unlike the purchase/pooling debate or
derivatives, this one is something I know a fair bit about!

First, Harvard does not have an honor code,
though they debated one in the 1980s. Nor does Harvard belong to the
Center for Academic Integrity, despite the fact that most of the other
Ivy Leagues, all the seven sisters except Radcliffe, and over 390
universities (including a few in Canada and Australia) do. That being
said, the Harvard BUSINESS School does have a code, voted in
overwhelmingly by its own students several years ago.

There is a tremendous variety in scope of honor
codes. Some address only academic issues while others have broader
coverage. I remember my senior year at Smith two fellow seniors were
expelled during their final semester for putting sugar in the gas tank
of another student. This was adjudicated under the honor code there.
However other campuses would handle such a thing through their students
affairs or residence life departments (or of course the police could be
called in).

For those unfamiliar with honor codes,
Melendez, McCabe & Trevino, and my papers have used these criteria for
an honor code:

1. unproctored exams
2. some kind of signed pledge that students will not cheat
3. a peer judiciary
4. reportage requirements, i.e., students should not tolerate
violations of academic integrity and have an obligation to report
them

Any one or a combination of these criteria must
be in place for a true honor code. McCabe's research has shown that
honor codes cut cheating about in half.

The clearing house, if you will, for honor
codes in place in the U.S. is the Center for Academic Integrity, at
www.academicintegrity.org

Now back to Bob's question, pretending it took
place at a university with an honor code. Did this plagiarism take place
in the context of coursework? I believe the answer in this case is no.
Therefore it would depend on whether the honor code was written to
encompass activities outside of class. Some codes would capture this
incident under the general category of behavior that brings disrepute to
the university (all sorts of things, including well-known athletes that
behave in a drunken manner in public, debate teams that trash a hotel
room, you name it). Others would have no jurisdiction in this case
because it did not take place in class, nor did she do it as part of an
organized university group or function.

Honor codes are a wonderful thing if students
are socialized into accepting them early. They can really make cheating
a major social gaffe, such that many students who might cheat elsewhere
wouldn't take the risk. Perhaps this woman would not have committed this
plagiarism if she had been at a university with an honor code culture. I
still remember how unnerved I was (and perhaps how naive) when I was
first a teaching assistant at LSU. I couldn't believe all the
precautions, including leaving bags at the front, removing hats, spacing
people apart, requiring photo identification on their desks, pacing the
rows, etc. I had never even been proctored during an exam before, so it
was really a culture shock!

I could go on and on, as this is a favorite
topic of mine, but I'll save more for another day. :-)

Duke’s Ever-Evolving iPod InitiativeGiven some of its recent publicity, this might
not have been the best time for Duke University to announce that it was
altering a highly popular student benefit. But Duke’s plan to stop
giving students free iPods through its path-setting Duke Digital
Initiative and to instead lend them or sell them the devices for a
highly subsidized $99 has even struck most students as a logical next
step in the maturation of the educational technology program. The
surprising headline on an editorial in Duke’s student newspaper: “A
Smart Change.”
"Duke’s Ever-Evolving iPod Initiative," by Doug Lederman, Inside
Higher Ed, April 28, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/04/28/ipod

General Motors Corp. Chairman and Chief
Executive Rick Wagoner, in a letter to shareholders, apologized for a
series of accounting errors and promised the auto maker is "working
diligently to get things moving in the right direction -- quickly"
following a huge loss last year.

In a letter to shareholders released Friday in
conjunction with the firm's proxy statement, the CEO said GM has "a
renewed commitment to excellence and transparency in our financial
reporting." The proxy also disclosed that his 2005 compensation fell by
nearly 50%.

GM faces six separate Securities and Exchange
Commission investigations of accounting problems and has received a
subpoena from a federal grand jury in connection with its accounting for
payments received from suppliers.

"While I will not offer excuses, I do apologize
on behalf of our management team, and assure that we will strive to
deserve your trust," Mr. Wagoner wrote in the letter. "The fact is that
errors were made, and we can't change that. What we have done is
disclose our mistakes and work as diligently as we can to fix them."

"Recognizing that a large part of these losses
resulted from GM's significant legacy cost burden and the difficulty of
adjusting structural costs in line with falling revenues, we noted Mr.
Wagoner's strong direction and steady leadership in systematically and
aggressively implementing a plan to restore the Corporation and North
American operations to profitability and positive cash flow," the
committee said in the proxy.

GM reported that Mr. Wagoner received $5.48
million in total pay last year, down nearly 50% from his total 2004 pay.
Mr. Wagoner's 2005 salary remained unchanged at $2.2 million, but he
didn't receive a bonus for the year, while he received a $2.46 million
bonus in 2004. GM previously announced that GM's top officers took pay
cuts and received no bonuses for 2005.

Despite the compensation cuts, Mr. Wagoner
received 400,000 options valued at $2.88 million in 2005. The year
before, he got the same amount of options, which were valued at $5.14
million when they were granted. Neither Mr. Wagoner nor other top GM
executives exercised options in 2005. Other GM executives took similar
cuts in total pay.

The California Public Employees' Retirement
System is demanding a conference call with the compensation committee of
the board of UnitedHealth Group Inc. over its disclosure practices, and
is threatening to withhold votes for board directors seeking
re-election.

In a letter sent to James A. Johnson, chairman
of the UnitedHealth board's compensation committee, Calpers board
President Rob Feckner demanded a conference call ahead of Tuesday's
UnitedHealth shareholders meeting to discuss what he called "serious
threats to the credibility, governance and performance of UnitedHealth."
Specifically, the letter criticized the company's failure to explain how
it determined stock option grant dates for Chief Executive William
McGuire and a handful of other executives in past years, and its
"inconsistent" disclosure of its option-granting program.

The move by Calpers increases the scrutiny of
the process by which Dr. McGuire received some of the $1.6 billion in
unrealized gains he holds in company stock options. Calpers holds 6.55
million shares, or 0.5%, of UnitedHealth's outstanding stock. The
pension fund, known for its strong stances on corporate governance,
could spur other investors to join in its criticism. The move also
increases pressure on UnitedHealth's board to more fully explain its
past option-award practices soon, even though its board only launched a
probe into them earlier this month.

Flashback from The Wall Street Journal,
April 26, 1988 To hear corporate raiders tell it, they -- not the
corporate managers they often seek to unseat -- are the true creators of
shareholder wealth in America. Like a platoon of real-life but unsullied
Gordon Gekkos, they argue that they make everyone rich.

The federal government recently signed a deal
with respirator manufacturers to stockpile 60 million disposable masks,
in case of a terrorist attack or global pandemic. But Americans should
know why the feds may not be getting the hundreds of millions of
additional masks they need to be fully prepared: the silicosis tort
scam.

Most recent silicosis news has been good, as
courts have begun to expose phony claims ginned up as a payday by
unethical doctors and lawyers. Yet thousands of bogus silicosis suits
are still in court, and they are now threatening to inflict the same
sort of economic and financial damage as did their precursor asbestos
suits. This time the litigation targets are companies vital to public
safety.

They include companies making N95 masks --
inexpensive, disposable respirators that are a mainstay of emergency
first responders, as well as industrial and health-care workers. Tort
attorneys are now claiming the masks had defective designs or warnings
and are responsible for a near epidemic of silicosis, a dust-related
disease. Not coincidentally, this new flood of silicosis litigation
began at precisely the time Congress began talking about cutting off the
asbestos cash cow with tort reform.

The Coalition for Breathing Safety, an industry
group, reports that between 2000 and 2004 plaintiffs attorneys filed
more than 326,000 claims against its five members. Some of these are
asbestos-related, although the recent deluge has been all silicosis. One
manufacturer (which prefers not to be named lest it become a bigger
target) says that prior to 2002 it faced about 200 silicosis claims a
year. In 2003-4, it got hit with 29,000.

Medical statistics alone suggest that the vast
majority of these suits are phony. According to the Centers for Disease
Control, silicosis deaths nationwide declined 93% from 1968 to 2002 and
today account for fewer than 200 average deaths annually in the U.S.

Respirators are also the only safety equipment
fully regulated by the government. The National Institute for
Occupational Safety and Health sets the design standards for masks. It
tests the products in its own lab, a standard that is higher than even
that applied to the drug industry, which conducts its own medical
trials. The regulators also approve the warning-label language attached
to the devices.

This explains why respirator makers have yet to
lose a case in court. Yet this matters little to plaintiffs attorneys,
whose strategy is to assault companies with so many claims that they can
no longer afford to defend themselves and thus must settle. The industry
coalition estimates its members have spent the equivalent of 90% of
their 2004 net income fighting suits in recent years. One company, Mine
Safety Appliances of Pittsburgh, has dropped out of the industrial
disposable market. The rest are choosing not to invest more to meet
rising demand, unable to see the point of making more low-margin
products amid high-margin litigation risks.

Continued in article

In Higher Education: Open Source Is the Answer. Now What Was the
Question?
An invitation for you to listen in and speak out

A different way to think about ... open
education A while back there was an article in The Chronicle of
Higher Education, "Open Source Is the Answer. Now What Was the
Question?" The question, according to Toru Iiyoshi, is "How can open
education's tools and resources demonstrably improve education quality?"
And in this month's Carnegie Perspectives, Toru, who directs the
Foundation's work using new media and emerging technologies, laments
that this question is not asked nearly enough.

Toru challenges his fellow advocates for open
education to tackle three challenges that stand in the way of real
impact on teaching and learning: the need to couple educational tools
and resources with information that allows others to use them
effectively; the need to bring more rewards to the work of documenting
and building on shared educational work; and the need to build larger
collaborative communities for sharing and building knowledge. The
changes Toru is calling for reflect a need to transform academic culture
in fundamental ways, making this a compelling piece even for those who
haven't yet thought much about open source tools and resources.

As usual, you can engage publicly with the
author and read and respond to what others have to say through Carnegie
Conversations at:

Before we discuss the Conservatives’
anti-crime package proposed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper last
week, we’re going to give you a figure that will stop you in your
tracks.

It’s that violent crime in Canada today is
35% higher than it was just 20 years ago.

You read that right. It’s from last year’s
Statistics Canada report on the crime rate.

But how is this possible, you’re asking?
Haven’t we constantly been told by the “hug a thug” crowd that crime
is going down and thus there is no need to toughen our laws?

Well, what liberal politicians, academics
and pundits have been doing is quoting the statistics very
selectively. It’s true that after peaking in 1991, violent crime has
been dropping, slowly. Today it’s down 10% from a decade ago.

But those who want to coddle criminals
don’t tell you that this very slight decline has in no way matched
the explosion in violent crime that started in the 1960s and
continued for 30 years. The real story is that violent crime today
is at levels that would have been considered appallingly high only
two decades ago.

In response to this reality, Harper this
week proposed three measures.

Unlike, say, the soft-drink or airline
industries, the child-pornography industry doesn't report its annual
sales to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Yet in a press release ahead of a recent House
of Representatives hearing aimed at curbing the industry, Texas
Republican Joe Barton said, "Child pornography is apparently a
multibillion … my staff analysis says $20 billion-a-year business.
Twenty billion dollars." Some press reports said the figure applied only
to the industry's online segment. The New York Times reported, "the
sexual exploitation of children on the Internet is a $20 billion
industry that continues to expand in the United States and abroad,"
citing witnesses at the hearing. (The Online Journal's Real Time column
also quoted the estimate from the hearing.)

. . .

Mr. Allen faxed me an NCMEC paper that cites
the McKinsey study in placing the child-porn industry at $6 billion in
1999, and $20 billion in 2004.

. . .

FBI spokesman Paul Bresson told me in an email,
"The FBI has not stated the $20 billion figure... . I have asked many
people who would know for sure if we have attached the $20 billion
number to this problem. I have scoured our Web site, too. Nothing!"

. . .

This isn't the first number from the NCMEC that
struck me as questionable.

. . .

As Congress debates whether to pass new laws
specifically outlawing online gambling, a recent poll appears to show
that the public is strongly against the legislative effort: Almost 80%
of Americans oppose a ban, according to the survey.

The poll was conducted by well-known polling
firm Zogby International on behalf of an online gambling trade group. As
I've written in the past, such sponsored research warrants extra
scrutiny from readers, though the fact that the poll was commissioned by
a special-interest group isn't by itself a reason to dismiss it.

. . .

The phrasing of that question seems to make an
assumption (the impossibility of regulation) that could have influenced
responses. Humphrey Taylor, chairman of the Harris Poll, told me that
the question was deliberately designed to "see how different arguments
played." He said he wouldn't use the response to that particular
question, which he called "projective," to determine whether people
support legalizing online gambling. "In any release we do, we are fair
and balanced, but any single projective question may not be," Mr. Taylor
said, adding that the poll wasn't sponsored.

Smell the roses at the movies: I wonder if the bad guys have B.O.Two movie theaters in Japan began offering a
novel sensory experience to audiences Saturday: smells synchronized to a
Hollywood adventure film. "The Scent of a Movie," MIT's Technology Review, April 24, 2006
---
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=16733

Yale is set to ditch Taliban Man and may hire a notorious
anti-Israel professorSayed Rahmatullah Hashemi's luck is running
out. Eight weeks ago the Taliban diplomat turned special Yale student
made a media splash on the cover of the New York Times magazine in which
he proclaimed: "In some ways I'm the luckiest person in the world, I
could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale." But
the continued outrage over the news that an unrepentant former official
of a criminal regime whose remnants are still killing U.S. soldiers in
Afghanistan is part of the Ivy League is catching up with him. Yale is
about to establish tougher standards for the program under which he is
applying to become a degree-status sophomore next fall, and the
consensus is that Mr. Hashemi won't measure up.
John Fund, "Cole Fire: Yale is set to ditch Taliban Man and may
hire a notorious anti-Israel professor," The Wall Street Journal,
April 24, 2006 ---
http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110008282

Question
What makes medical insurance so expensive in Massachusetts?
Or the bigger question is whether this really meets the definition of
"insurance."

Answer
The reason is called "Guaranteed Issue." You can wait until you need
really expensive medical treatment before you take out a policy. I
suspect this is the reason the state has such a high rate of uninsured.
You need not pay for coverage until an urgent need arises to cash in. I
wonder if ambulance drivers sell policies.

How bad are Massachusetts' insurance
regulations? One good indicator is that it's one of few states in
which eHealthinsurance doesn't sell policies in the individual
market. eHealthinsurance is an Internet insurance brokerage that
makes it easy for people in most of the 50 states to find out what
kind of coverage is being offered in their areas. We tried to price
coverage in the Bay State and came up empty. So we called the
company to ask why. "Guaranteed issue," was Chief Operating Officer
Bob Fahlman's instantaneous reply.

Guaranteed issue is the name of a
regulation that requires insurance companies to sell policies to all
comers, even those who wait until they're sick to seek coverage.
Naturally the requirement to accept those free riders makes
insurance much more expensive for everyone else. It also means
insurance companies aren't eager to be found by consumers, even
though they are generally required to sell in the individual market
in order to be able to offer coverage through employers. Yes, you
read that right, they don't want customers.

Guaranteed issue is the name of a
regulation that requires insurance companies to sell policies to all
comers, even those who wait until they're sick to seek coverage.
Naturally the requirement to accept those free riders makes
insurance much more expensive for everyone else. It also means
insurance companies aren't eager to be found by consumers, even
though they are generally required to sell in the individual market
in order to be able to offer coverage through employers. Yes, you
read that right, they don't want customers.

So in Massachusetts, insurers hide, in part
by refusing to pay commissions to brokers such as eHealthinsurance.
Their prices are also a disincentive. An eHealthinsurance survey
earlier this month found the Aetna HMO in Boston asking $1,719 a
month to cover a young family of four, and $560 for one
nine-year-old child.

The new Massachusetts health care
legislation does little to address the root causes of this cost
problem. Guaranteed issue is explicitly preserved. And while a new
insurance regulation board could in theory do something about other
costly mandates, it's not likely to do much in practice.

The $200 per month target price Governor
Romney is talking about for the state's new mandatory insurance is
higher than 80% of the individual policies eHealthinsurance reported
in a study of 80,000 customers nationwide late last year. The range
of average monthly premiums for individuals was as low as $98 in
Michigan and as high as $245 in New Jersey and $379 in New York. The
latter are the only two guaranteed-issue states in which
eHealthinsurance sold individual policies during the study period,
by the way. Massachusetts didn't make the cut.

We note all this because there's a far
simpler way to begin tackling the problem of the uninsured than the
Massachusetts path. To wit: Let the market start operating as it
should. Companies like eHealthinsurance have already got a great
infrastructure up and running and in many states consumers have real
choices when it comes to health insurance products. States like New
York and New Jersey, meanwhile, might try getting the regulators out
of the way before following the Bay State in forcing people to buy
needlessly expensive coverage.

"Answers to Your Photo Printing Questions: In Part 2 of
our series, our expert goes to the hardware makers to get your questions
answered," by Danny Allen of PC World via The Washington Post,
April 25, 2006 ---
Click Here

In this second installment of our special look
at your printer questions answered by the vendors themselves, I move on
to photo-related issues. These include questions about all-in-ones that
print onto CDs and DVDs, minimizing photo edge cropping, and printing
slides and gallery-quality prints.

If you've got questions about how to prevent
ink smears, which multifunction printers support legal-size paper, which
printers have 64-bit drivers, and wireless networking options, read Part
1, " If you've got questions about how to prevent ink smears, which
multifunction printers support legal-size paper, which printers have
64-bit drivers, and wireless networking options, read Part 1, "Printer
Makers Answer Your Urgent Questions ."

Note that some questions and responses in this
column have been edited for brevity.

If you'd like to see whatPC Worldthought of
many printer models, click on any of the following links to see a list
of printers we've reviewed from that company: Brother , Canon , Dell ,
Epson , Hewlett-Packard , Lexmark , Oki Data Americas , Ricoh , Samsung
, and Xerox .

Now let's look at the responses to your
questions concerning professional and recreational photo printing.

I have been looking for a printer that is
capable of printing large gicl #00026#233; e prints of my watercolors.
Which printers can create gicl #00026#233; e prints and at what
resolutions?

Upshot: "Gicl #00026#233; e" refers to
high-resolution, large-format prints made with fade-resistant inks,
often for commercial art sales. Below you'll find suggestions from the
vendors I spoke to, but other companies such as Kodak and ColorSpan also
offer commercial gicl #00026#233; e printing solutions.

You might also want to read my March column on
You might also want to read my March column onprofessional photo
printers .

Brother: Brother does not offer gicl
#00026#233; e printers.

Canon: The Canon:TheimagePROGRAF iPF5000 is
capable of printing at 2400 by 1200 dots per inch. This would be our
only recommendation.

Continued in article

From The Washington Post on April 25,
2006

What is the name of the Internet-based
effort that placed more than 17,000 public domain books online to download?

It wasn't collegiate life as she once imagined
it. But it wasn't so unconventional, either. These days, a majority of
students take a similarly nomadic path to a degree; about 60 percent of
students graduating from college attend more than one institution, a
number that has risen steadily over at least the last two decades.

In large part, those numbers reflect the
growing population of nontraditional-age students, adults who go to
college later in life and often start at a two-year institution. But
even traditional students like Ms. Madden — those who head to a
four-year college right out of high school — are approaching the
experience in a nontraditional way.

They transfer to get a more agreeable major or
social life, or take classes at a college back home during the summer to
get a leg up on the next year's credits. They take an online class, or
earn credits during the year at a nearby community college where they
find a required course cheaper, less demanding or at a more convenient
hour. Or they do some of each.

College officials call it swirling, mix and
match, cut and paste, grab and go. Whatever the term of art, it makes
sense for the so-called millennial generation, students famously lacking
in brand loyalty, used to having things their way, and can-do about
changing anything they don't like. As with other commodities, students
are looking for that magic combination of quality, affordability and
convenience. They shun CD's to create their own iPod playlists; is it
any surprise they shape their own course catalogs?

For nearly eight decades, TIAA-CREF was the
big man on campus. It had a virtual monopoly on managing retirement
plans for millions of college educators. Now it's being schooled by
Wall Street in how to compete in the field it invented.

TIAA-CREF's share of its main market --
managing retirement funds for employees of universities -- has
tumbled to 70% from essentially 100% in about a decade. The problem:
While rivals innovated and clients demanded new services,
TIAA-CREF's ways of doing business seemed frozen in time.

For the past three years, the task of
reviving its fortunes has fallen to an unlikely leader for a firm
founded as a nonprofit and steeped in the academic world. Former
investment banker Herbert Allison, once a contender for the top post
at Merrill Lynch & Co., arrived in late 2002 to transform the stodgy
organization and go head-to-head with financial powerhouses such as
Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab & Co. and AIG Valic, the
retirement-plan arm of insurer American International Group Inc.

His plans at TIAA-CREF are ambitious. Mr.
Allison, 62 years old, is launching an online brokerage arm. He is
replacing a computer system so antiquated it's hard to find
programmers to update it. (Mr. Allison jokes that it was "programmed
in Aramaic.") To focus on the core business, he has dropped his
predecessor's plan to market more to non-academics. In the biggest
departure, he is hiring 500 financial advisers to persuade retiring
university employees to keep their money at TIAA-CREF rather than
roll it into a competitor's shop.

But missteps and controversies have hobbled
the overhaul. In 2004, two members of the board of trustees caused a
scandal when they went into a side business with TIAA-CREF's
independent auditors. Criticized for a conflict of interest, they
left the board. Then, a bid to upgrade the computer system in a
hurry backfired on thousands of clients, some of whom didn't receive
pension or other retirement-account payments for a time. Meanwhile,
a program of steeply raising mutual-fund fees angered some clients
and prompted fund-tracker Morningstar Inc. to accuse TIAA-CREF of
"blatant disregard" for shareholders. (See related article).

Reactions like that could imperil one of
TIAA-CREF's great strengths: the nonprofit's longtime reputation as
being on the side of the little guy. "It doesn't seem right that
they would turn this company into a Merrill Lynch. They're not as
interested in the individual clients as they are in making profits,"
says Dick Benson, a retired math professor in Bellevue, Wash. Mr.
Allison says the challenge is to execute a transformation "without
the company losing its soul."

TIAA-CREF's main business is to contract
with universities to handle the retirement money of their employees.
Most of that money resides in two giant TIAA-CREF accounts, one
invested in stocks and the other in bonds and real estate. Since the
late 1990s, TIAA-CREF also has given these employees the option of
several mutual funds that it runs. Today TIAA-CREF manages a massive
$370 billion for 3.2 million active and retired university
employees, as well as some employees at research and health-care
institutions.

This is a tempting target for Wall Street
firms that have built up big businesses managing retirement money
for corporate employees and that offer lots of investment options.
The 1990s explosion in popularity of do-it-yourself retirement plans
such as the 401(k) has edged into the insular world of academia.
There, transplants from the corporate world have been demanding more
investment options. The result is an intensifying competition to
manage a huge pool of retirement money -- some of it up for grabs as
baby boomers retire -- that TIAA-CREF once had to itself.

Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate and
philanthropist, in 1918 founded what would become TIAA-CREF, partly
to help ease aging professors into retirement and open spots for
younger people. The TIAA part of its name stands for Teachers
Insurance and Annuity Association, and is the part that invests in
bonds and real estate. CREF, or College Retirement Equities Fund,
invests in stocks. TIAA-CREF as a whole is a nonprofit, though a
couple of its diverse units are for-profit.

The company was a pioneer, making it
possible for professors to switch jobs and take their pensions with
them. They could do that in part because whatever college they moved
to, TIAA-CREF would be in charge of retirement money there, as well.
After World War II, when inflation became a concern, the
organization combined stock investing with an insurance guarantee
that holders would get their investment back if they died before
retirement. It thus created the first variable annuity.

TIAA-CREF's nonprofit heritage and low
management fees persuaded many it was on the side of the angels.
Bolstering this image, it has offered people the chance to have
their retirement money in "socially responsible" investments, such
as firms with environmentally friendly policies. It also has
sometimes used its large stockholdings to pressure companies on
issues such as high executive pay.

Falling Behind

But by the 1980s, TIAA-CREF was falling
behind the times. For instance, it didn't offer a basic money-market
account until late in the decade, after they had become common. In
the 1990s, Fidelity, Vanguard Group and other large mutual-fund
firms started making inroads on its campus business. Colleges were
feeling pressure from employees to offer more choices for retirement
money than just TIAA-CREF's limited lineup.

Then in 2002, one of its oldest clients,
Stanford University, brought in Fidelity for a computer upgrade.
Stanford wanted a better system to track money withheld from
paychecks and to generate account statements. In a sign of
TIAA-CREF's lack of awareness of its changing industry, it declined
to help. Fidelity provided the computer system free. In the process,
it made it more convenient for Stanford employees to invest with
Fidelity.

After lying dormant for a while, the Mommy Wars
reignited late last year with “Homeward Bound,” an article by the
feminist legal scholar Linda Hirshman in the December American Prospect.
Hirshman, who is not known for mincing words (she earned a spot in
Bernard Goldberg’s book 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America by
declaring that women who leave work to raise children are choosing
“lesser lives”), boldly assailed the truism that, when it comes to
full-time mothering vs. careers, it’s a good thing for women to have a
choice.

Hirshman surveyed 33 women whose wedding
announcements had appeared in The New York Times during a three-week
period in 1996. Of the 30 with children, she found, half were not
employed and only five were working full-time.

Drawing on that and other studies, Hirshman
argued that such choices by elite women are a primary reason for the
dearth of women in the corridors of political and economic power.
Instead of “reaping feminism’s promise of opportunity,” she wrote, these
former lawyers and executives are in the kitchen baking apple pies.

While Hirshman conceded that those “expensively
educated upper-class moms” seemed happy at home, she insisted that “what
they do is bad for them [and] is certainly bad for society.” It’s bad
for society, she argued, because it reinforces a “gendered ideology” of
family roles, perpetuates male dominance in government and business, and
deprives ambitious women of role models. It’s bad for the women who give
up careers, Hirshman suggested, because they fall short of a good life,
which includes “using one’s capacities for speech and reason in a
prudent way,” “having enough autonomy to direct one’s own life,” and
“doing more good than harm in the world.”

Continued in article

I never cared that Caitlin Flanagan calls
herself an at-home mother, even though she's a magazine writer with a staff
of helpers. But now she's using her battle with cancer to denounce feminism
and extol her traditional virtues -- and I've had it. Everyone knows Caitlin
Flanagan isn't a stay-at-home mother, she's an accomplished writer who plays
a stay-at-home mom in magazines and on TV. Right? Part of why I've never
gotten upset about Flanagan's pro-hearth and home shtick is that I've seen
it as just that, shtick. I'd read enough to know she had a full-time nanny
when her twin sons were infants and she was trying to be a novelist; then
she wrote about modern womanhood and family life for the Atlantic Monthly
after they hit preschool; now, with her boys in grade school, she's got a
great gig at the New Yorker. So how is she not a career woman who's also a
mom?
Joan Walsh, "The happy hypocrite," Salon, April 12, 2006 ---
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/04/12/flanagan/index_np.html

It was 94 years ago this month that the
unsinkable Titanic collided with a North Atlantic iceberg. Of the 1,327
passengers on board, 73% of the women made it to the lifeboats, while
only 7% of the men survived. That fateful night, the bodies of 702 men
settled into their watery graves.

Within days of the tragedy, women set out to
build a fitting memorial. First Lady Helen Taft donated the first
dollar, explaining she was “glad to do this in gratitude to the chivalry
of American manhood.”

Of course not everyone was thrilled. Some
argued that the fund-raising efforts were diverting attention away from
the crusade to grant women the right to vote. One politically-correct
person argued, “Why not, instead of having the memorial solely for the
heroes of the wreck, have it also for the heroines!”

But the grateful ladies persisted. In May of
1931 Mrs. William Howard Taft unveiled the imposing 15-foot memorial,
featuring a man in a Christ-like crucifix pose. [
http://my.execpc.com/~reva/mem4.htm ] The
statue was located in a splendid venue on the banks of the Potomac
River, just a little downstream from Rock Creek.

Second-grade teacher Crystal Mendez was in the
staff lunchroom at 42nd Street Elementary in Los Angeles when a broker
introduced herself and started talking up a retirement plan.

Mendez thought she could trust the woman
because her company had been endorsed by her teachers union. She agreed
to put $400 a month into a retirement account, assuming her money would
be invested in stocks. Just 22, she figured she had plenty of time to
ride out any dips in the market.

Nearly two years later, when her boyfriend
started bragging about the returns he was earning on his 401(k), Mendez
took a closer look at her own account. "He was earning 15 percent a year
and I was earning 3 percent," she recalled. "I thought, 'There's
something wrong here.'"

Mendez's money was languishing in a fixed-rate
annuity, an investment ill-suited to someone in her early 20s. Worse,
she would have to pay a steep penalty to bail out.

Public-school teachers across the country are
in similar predicaments.

And many have their unions to thank for it.

Some of the nation's largest teachers unions
have joined forces with investment companies to steer their members into
retirement plans that frequently have high expenses and mediocre
returns.

In what might seem an unlikely partnership, the
unions endorse investment providers, even specific products, and the
companies reciprocate with financial support. They sponsor union
conferences, advertise in union publications or make direct payments to
union treasuries.

The investment firms more than recoup their
money through sales of annuities and other high-fee products to teachers
for their 403(b) plans - personal retirement accounts similar to
401(k)s.

New York State United Teachers, for instance,
receives $3 million a year from ING Group for encouraging its 525,000
members to invest in an annuity sold by the Dutch insurance giant.

The National Education Association, the largest
teachers union in the country with 2.7 million members, collected nearly
$50 million in royalties in 2004 on the sale of annuities, life
insurance and other financial products it endorses.

One might have been tempted--had one been
consulted--to suggest a renaming of this latest book by Amartya Sen. "Identity
and Violence" is much too lurid. "Sen and Sensibility," by contrast,
would have been a perfect title, reflecting better the author's
exquisite concern for everyone's personal feelings and his desire to
make large-hearted accommodation for every political and social
bent--except, notably, the religious and nationalist kind.

Mr. Sen, now a professor at Harvard, was
awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics for his contributions to the
field of welfare economics. He has a CV so seriously good that everyone,
surely, knows of his being (in his previous post) the Master of Trinity
College, Cambridge, the apex of the British academic pyramid.

'Miniaturization of Human Beings'

"Identity and Violence" is not an entirely
tedious book, although it is more than a tad repetitive. Its thesis is
that the ascription to individuals of "singular identities"--in other
words, to speak of a person as "a Muslim" to the exclusion of other
facets of his personality--leads to the "miniaturization of human
beings." And this, he avers, is Not Good. It is also Not Accurate. And
Unhelpful. And Divisive. And Dangerous.

Put another way, the reduction of individuals
to a "choiceless singularity"--religion being, for the most part, a
state one is born into--leads to the "solitarist belittling of human
identity." Such reductiveness, Mr. Sen claims, merely plays into the
hands of that rabble-rouser Samuel Huntington, who insists on seeing the
world in terms of differentiated civilizations based largely on
religion. Mr. Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations," published in
1996, continues to play a Manichaean role--in Mr. Sen's view--in the war
on terror. Mr. Sen asserts that, in truth, people have multiple
identities and that the Huntingtonian view (which Mr. Sen simplifies to
the point of caricature) is willfully blind to this complexity. But what
exactly are these layers of identity that Mr. Sen speaks of?

Here is what he says: "The same person can be,
without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin,
with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a
long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a
feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a
theater lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician,
and someone who is deeply committed to the view that there are
intelligent beings in outer space with whom it is extremely urgent to
talk (preferably in English)."

Apart from being a flawless recitation of a
left-liberal catechism--except for the bit about outer space--what
exactly does this mean? And how does all this help us? Mr. Sen is here
conflating identity with predilection, as well as denying that there
is--or can be--a hierarchy of potency within a catalog of personal
states. I don't mean to belittle the power of endorphins, but is being a
long-distance runner the same, in an accounting of identity, as being a
Christian or an American? This is, perhaps, a ludic list of identities;
but it is also faintly ludicrous.

Cricket and Feminism

Naturally, to say that a Muslim has only one
dimension to his identity--to wit, the Islamic one--is unhelpful and
unsound. But contrary to Mr. Sen's repeated assertion, few in the West
take so reductionist a position. We speak of the "Muslim world," of
course, and of "Muslim communities," but that is because both exist in
the real world. They have not been willed into existence by our own
taxonomical miscalculations. And by referring to countries or societies
as "Muslim," we are not suggesting either that a Pakistani is identical
to a Sudanese or that an individual Muslim cannot also be a cricket
player, a gourmet, a qawwali singer or--Allah willing--a
feminist.

So when Mr. Sen asks--Is a "religion-centered
analysis of the people of the world a helpful way of understanding
humanity?"--I ask back: Is ignoring religion, or diminishing its
importance, a helpful way of understanding humanity? The view from
Cambridge (Mass. and England) is clearly not the same as the view from
my office in New York, which overlooks Ground Zero.

To understand Mr. Sen's desire to get away from
religion-based political taxonomy, one must be aware of where, as they
say, he is coming from. The Nobel laureate--who has taken to describing
himself as a "feminist economist"--is a full-fledged member of the
Indian "progressive" left. If there is one concern that drives this
group, that animates its politics like no other, it is the perfectly
well-meaning desire to safeguard India's Muslim minority from the
excesses of the country's Hindu right. This desire has led to such
contortions as the left's defense of a separate personal law for India's
Muslims (which leaves Muslim women at the mercy of inequitable rules on
divorce and inheritance) merely because the Hindu right campaigns for a
uniform civil code for all Indian citizens, irrespective of religion.

'Brutal Manipulation'

People like Mr. Sen overlook Muslim or Islamic
failings for fear of appearing "unsecular." Any political conflict in
which one side is characterized as "Muslim" is automatically disparaged
as being anti There is also a tendency
on the part of thinkers like Mr. Sen to diminish the political and
scientific contributions of the West and to glorify the achievements of
non-Western (and, where possible, Islamic) societies. So the Muslim
emperor Akbar, the lofty Mughal, is lauded for his tolerance of all
faiths. But no one stops to ask why the edifice of Islamic tolerance
collapsed after his death in 1605.

Likewise, early Islamic-Arabic breakthroughs in
mathematics are held up as proof of intellectual greatness--and, yes, at
the time of their conception they were indeed great. But why did the
Islamic world flounder later into a state of long-running
anti-scientism? As always, Mr. Sen compares the very best of the
non-West with quotidian practice in the West. This is a common problem
with the defenders of Islam--or, in Mr. Sen's case, with the critics of
the critics of Islam.

Mr. Sen, inescapably, is a member of Bengal's
bhadralok, or gentleman class. (As the joke goes: One Bengali is a poet;
two Bengalis are a film society; three are a political party; and four
are two political parties--both leftist.) What Mr. Sen really wants is
for all of us to be "fair" to each other. Fair enough. But his
idealistic thesis twists and turns to remake the world in its own image.
Ultimately, his picture--though pretty--bears little relation to
reality. It makes me so sad.

Technology Questions and Answers from Walt Mossberg

"Moving iTunes Files To a
New Computer," The Wall Street Journal, April
20, 2006; Page B3

There's no other major item
most of us own that is as confusing, unpredictable and unreliable as
our personal computers. Everybody has questions about them, and we
aim to help.

Here are a few questions
about computers I've received recently from people like you, and my
answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for
readability. This week my mailbox contained questions about moving
iTunes files to a new computer, file-compressing programs and
security software.

If you have a question, send
it to me at
mossberg@wsj.com, and I may select it to be answered here in

Mossberg's Mailbox.

Q:I recently
bought an Apple iBook to replace an old Dell laptop. How do I move
my iTunes music files from the Dell to the Apple?

A: Your iTunes music
files work on both Windows and Mac machines, as does the special
iTunes Library file that keeps track of play lists and the like. So,
all you have to do is copy these files from the Dell to the Apple,
as with any other files you want to move. In fact, even if you were
moving from an old Dell to a new Dell, without changing operating
systems, the process would be the same.

If you have allowed iTunes to
gather all of your files into the folder called "iTunes" within "My
Music," all you have to do is copy that folder to the iBook. This
can be done in a number of ways, but the best choices would be to do
this via a home network or by burning the files to CDs or DVDs and
then copying them from the CDs or DVDs onto the Mac. On the Mac, the
iTunes folder is usually located within the Music folder.

If your music files are
scattered, or are in the My Music folder, but not the iTunes folder,
you'll have to locate them before copying them. Be sure to copy the
iTunes folder also, because it contains the iTunes Library file.

If you have an iPod and it
contains all of your songs and play lists, you can skip these steps.
Just download one of the many cheap utility programs for the Mac
that will copy the contents of an iPod to a computer. Two examples
are PodWorks and PodUtil, the latter of which comes in a Windows
version for Windows-to-Windows transfers.

One more thing: Be sure to
deauthorize the Dell from your iTunes account before authorizing the
Mac, so you don't waste one of your maximum of five slots for
computers that can play any songs you purchase. To do this, fire up
iTunes on the Dell, go to the Advanced menu and select "Deauthorize
Computer."

Q:What program do
you recommend the most for compression and decompression of files?
Winrar, WinZip or any other program?

A: On Windows, I use
WinZip (www.winzip.com),
because of its flexibility, even though the
operating system can compress and decompress files by itself. On the
Mac, I use Stuffit (www.stuffit.com),
for similar reasons. A decompress-only version
of Stuffit came with earlier versions of Mac OS X, Apple's operating
system. The current version of OS X, Tiger, can compress and
decompress files in the popular Zip compression format without
Stuffit.

Q:I run Norton Internet Security,
Ad-Aware and Spybot on my computer to keep "bad stuff" from
infecting my system. Yet last week a malicious program attacked my
computer. It hijacked my wallpaper and put a huge warning on my
desktop. My security software never knew it was there. Do I need to
run additional security on my computer?

A: This category of spyware or adware is
expanding so fast that, even with the two good anti-spyware programs
you are using, attacks can happen. My only advice is to add a third,
such as Webroot's Spy Sweeper, which is my favorite. I know this is
annoying, but until the spyware/adware epidemic slows down, it is
often necessary for Windows users to have multiple defenses.

The study concluded that using a mobile phone or handheld device
made it nearly three times more likely that a driver would have a crash.

Researchers at the Virginia Tech
Transportation Institute rigged up 100 cars with video cameras and
other data recording devices to chronicle 42,300 hours of data and
images of people driving in the general vicinity of Washington,
D.C., and the Virginia suburbs. The study captured video of a total
of 241 drivers ranging in age from 18 to over 55. Over the course of
a year, the test cars got into a total of 82 accidents (69 of which
were fully recorded), 761 near crashes and 8,295 "incidents,"
defined as events requiring an evasive maneuver.

The study, available from VTTI or on
NHTSA's Web site, is full of nuggets guaranteed to make you paranoid
about fellow travelers on the highway. It may also cause some
critical self-assessment among multi-tasking commuters.

The basic thrust of the study's data,
including the grainy videos of people nodding off or looking over
their shoulders just before rear-ending a car ahead, is that most
drivers behave as if driving a car is a task that can be delegated
to the reptilian regions of the brain that regulate such automatic
behaviors as breathing and blinking. Thus, the motorist is free to
process information or perform tasks that aren't related to the
driving chore, including using a phone, having lunch, or, in the
extreme, taking a catnap.

The study's findings make a persuasive case
that drivers are wrong to think they can get away with this. The
VTTI's work shows that any distraction, including getting behind the
wheel when you should be getting more sleep, greatly raises the odds
of an accident or a gut-wrenching near-miss. NHTSA released a
reminder of the stakes last week, saying that 43,200 people died in
highway accidents last year, up from 42,636 in 2004. The fatality
rate also rose to 1.46 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled
from 1.44 in 2004, which NHTSA says was the record low.

That said, the VTTI study data suggest not
all drivers are equal -- some are really bad. A chart included in a
long version of the study shows that two drivers were responsible
for a disproportionate share of accidents. One 18-year-old woman was
involved in three crashes, 53 near-crashes and 401 "incidents." A
41-year-old woman was involved in four crashes, 56 near-crashes and
449 incidents.

Pause and take that in. In the space of a
year or so, two people were involved a total of 116 crashes or
near-crashes, and a combined 850 incidents that involved some sort
of swerving or emergency avoidance maneuver. Consider that this
track record of bad driving was compiled even though the motorists
knew that they were being watched by a camera. This makes you wonder
what the world would be like if really bad drivers could somehow be
taken off the road. This study (which, to be sure, is limited)
suggests that targeting and revoking the driving privileges of the
very worst drivers -- say, anyone who gets into three at-fault
accidents in a year -- would make a big difference to overall
highway safety, avoiding who knows how much injury, death and
economic pain.

The data about what people do in their
cars, and how it contributes to crashes, near-crashes and erratic
driving is also discouraging. Fiddling with a "wireless device,"
usually a mobile phone, was by far the biggest contributor to
near-crashes and evasive-maneuver incidents. Talking on a cellphone
was blamed for 466 bad driving incidents, and more than 35
near-misses. Dialing a hand-held cellphone was linked to 87
incidents of erratic driving.

The study concluded that using a mobile
phone or handheld device made it nearly three times more likely that
a driver would have a crash. Applying makeup raised the odds of a
crash even more, to just above three times more likely. Reaching for
a moving object -- a flying coffee cup, say -- made a crash nearly
nine times more likely. Drivers had accidents and near-misses when
they took their eyes off the road ahead to glance at a roadside
distraction or a passenger.

Continued in article

Big trouble in store for academic journal monopolistsThe European Commission, the executive arm of
the European Union, has issued a report that
recommends open access to all publicly financed research, according to an
article in The
Guardian. The report calls for a “guarantee” of
open access. It recommends creating that guarantee by having researchers put
copies of published articles in online archives that are free to all. Such a
step would be stronger than the one taken nearly a year ago by the National
Institutes of Health, which merely requested that its grantees put copies of
their published articles in the agency’s own online repository, PubMed
Central (The Chronicle, February 4, 2005). Open-access advocates, including
Peter Suber, director of the Open Access Project at Public Knowledge, a
nonprofit group that advocates the free flow of information, hope the report
will spur national governments—or even all of Europe—to make such public
archiving mandatory. (Mr. Suber has blogged about the report
here) But scientific publishers fear that if
research papers are free on the Web, readers may stop paying for
subscriptions (The Chronicle, January 30, 2004).
Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog 4/19/06
"European Panel Endorses Broad Open Access Policy for Research," Scholarly
Communication Blog from the University of Illinois, April 20, 2006 ---
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/

Google is
mum on how -- if at all -- it plans to use its recently
granted patent for a voice-enabled search engine --
despite the fact that it has also hired several
speech-recognition researchers.

Originally filed in February 2001,
the patent was granted for "Voice
interface for a search engine,"
in a move that likely signals some
level of development at Google on voice technology for
searching the Web using handhelds. Further fueling
speculation is Google's poaching of several
speech-recognition specialists -- the kind of move that
often signals that a new product is afoot.

A forensic anthropologist at Middle Tennessee
State University is one of a select number of scientists to participate
in the examination of a skeleton that could force historians to rewrite
the story of the entire North American continent.

Dr. Hugh Berryman, research professor, was one
of only 11 experts from across the United States to scrutinize the bones
of Kennewick Man, a 9,300-year-old skeleton found 10 years ago along the
Columbia River at Kennewick, Wash.

“It’s one of the oldest skeletons, one of the
earliest individuals that populated this continent,” Berryman says. “And
we have a chance to look at those remains and learn from them what they
tell us about the past and who these people were.”

The 380 bones are being preserved at the
University of Washington’s Burke Museum under an agreement with the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers, which controls the land on which Kennewick was
discovered. Berryman says he was between two and three feet deep in the
ground. The burial miraculously saved the bones from the elements, the
animals, machinery and man for centuries, and ancient deposits of
calcium carbonate on the bones allowed the researchers to determine the
positioning of the bones in the ground.

“We have evidence that the bones were still in
anatomic order,” Berryman says. “He was still articulated, and he
appears to have been a burial. So once something is buried, that moves
it at a depth that perhaps the coyotes, the wolves, scavengers could not
get to it.”

The July 2005 research was very nearly derailed
when the Corps initially decided to turn Kennewick over to a coalition
of Native American tribes. Eight scientists filed a federal lawsuit to
gain permission to study the skeleton. A federal judge, whose ruling
later was upheld by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, decided in
favor of the scientists after determining that the tribes could not
prove a direct cultural affiliation with Kennewick.

Berryman says the information that can be
gleaned from Kennewick came close to being lost forever.

“Since 1990, we’ve lost most of the skeletal
remains from groups,” Berryman says. “It’s a shame that a lot of these
groups are already gone. We have no way of knowing what kind of
movements there were in prehistoric times, where these people came from,
who they were related to, what other tribal groups they might be related
to.”

What the experts were able to ascertain from
their brief encounter with Kennewick is that he did not look like a
Native American. In fact, Berryman says Kennewick’s facial features are
most similar to those of a Japanese group called the Ainu, who have a
different physical makeup and cultural background from the ethnic
Japanese.

Swimming-pool drowning cases involve a
disproportionate number of black boys and young adults, and public pools
appear to be the primary danger zone, U.S. government researchers have
found.

In one of the most extensive studies to look at
the issue, investigators found that nearly half of the swimming-pool
drownings they tracked occurred among African Americans - with males
being at particular risk.

The findings, published in the American Journal
of Public Health, not only confirm past research showing that a large
number of young drowning victims are African American, but also identify
where these deaths are happening.

Nationally, between 1995 and 1998, 51 percent
of drownings among blacks ages 5 to 24 happened in a public pool. Most
often, it was a hotel or motel pool. That stands in contrast to white
children and young adults, 55 percent of whom drowned in a residential
pool.

It's not clear why young African Americans,
males in particular, are more likely than other racial groups to drown.
But the new findings point to the places where prevention efforts are
most needed, according to the investigators, led by Dr. Gitanjali Saluja
of the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

When educators discuss their greatest diversity
challenges these days, many focus on the recruitment and retention of
black male students. At many campuses, two-thirds of black students are
female, and the lack of black men raises all sort of troubling
questions.

Michael Cuyjet, acting associate
provost for student life and associate professor of
education at the University of Louisville, is both a
contributor to and editor of the volume. In a recent
interview, he discussed some of the issues raised by the
book.

Q: Many colleges are
experiencing gender gaps across racial and ethnic lines.
What do you consider the factors that most hinder the
enrollment of black men in higher education?

A: There are many
factors, each contributing a bit more to the cumulative
issues. However, the two most significant factors
hindering enrollment in the first place (as different
from the problem of attrition of those who do enroll)
could be characterized as under-preparedness and
cultural disincentives. Many African American boys are
provided with less-than-adequate academic preparation
due to poor school environments and discriminatory
practices such as being tracked into behavior disorder
classes in inordinately high proportion to their numbers
in the school population. Compounding this broad lack of
attention to their academic success, many
African-American young men fail to consider academic
achievement a worthwhile goal and, in fact, often
consider college education (and even high school
graduation) as not worth the effort or not “cool” among
their peers.

Q: How much of an impact
does the paucity of African-American men have on those
who are enrolled, and on black women in higher
education?

A: When the number of
African-American men in a particular college fails to
achieve “critical” mass — a population of
African-American men large enough to sustain their
cultural identity and peer support for the group’s
members — the college community is usually seen as
lacking, at best, or as hostile by African-American men
who fail to find a level of cultural comfort in the
campus community. The paucity also affects
African-American women in at least three ways. First,
the lack of African-American men usually contributes to
the failure to reach this critical mass of
African-American students to have a viable coeducational
cultural presence. Second, a significant imbalance
resulting from a disproportionately high ratio of
women-to-men makes normal social interactions,
particularly dating opportunities, difficult within the
African-American college community. Third, the paucity
of African-American men in college translates to a
scarcity of college-educated African-American men, which
has equally important negative ramifications for the
post-collegiate social life of African-American female
college graduates.

Q: Does the impact vary at
historically black campuses?

A: Many of the factors
discussed in the book affect African-American men
similarly on both predominantly white institutions and
historically black colleges and universities. However,
the institutional racism identified by many
African-American men as a serious detractor at PWIs is
usually absent at HBCUs. On the other hand, some of the
worst skewed male-to-female ratios occur at HBCUs,
exacerbating the social problems mentioned in the
previous question. Walter Kimbrough and Shaun Harper
also point out another phenomenon — that many African
American men at HBCUs have expressed the perception that
PWIs are generally superior institutions, contributing
to their inferior perception of themselves as students
at inferior institutions.

Q: Are there particular
recruitment strategies that you think are most effective
and that more colleges should consider?

A: This book does not
particularly address pre-college conditions of
African-American men and, thus, does not examine
recruitment activities. However, it would seem that
introducing African American men during the recruitment
and orientation process to some of the more positive
interventions addressed in the book would give these
young men the perception that the institution is very
interested in their success. Examples might include
mentoring programs, special efforts to engage them in
the co-curricular life of the campus, and academic
enrichment programs targeted at African American male
students.

Q: How do you view the role
of black Greek organizations in terms of the impact —
positive and negative — on black men who are enrolled?

A: This is a question
with a very complex answer, since there is evidence of
both positive and negative factors. Briefly, one
positive aspect of black Greek organizations is that
they afford many African-American men the opportunity
for active extracurricular involvement and particularly
for leadership roles that are either closed to them or
which they are reluctant to pursue in the greater
college community. Conversely, the persistence of hazing
incidents and the empirical evidence of lower grades
Shaun Harper identifies have contributed to what he
refers to as the “diminished public perception” that
hurts members of the black fraternities.

Q: On some campuses with
small percentages of black male students, the most
visible black men are athletes. What message does this
send to a campus?

A: The high visibility
of African-American male athletes and the usual
corresponding invisibility of the African-American male
non-athlete students contribute to the stereotype of
African-American men as non-intellectual. This is
patently unfair both to the athletes who do perform
successfully as students and to the non-athletes who are
rarely recognized for their academic prowess. The
rigorous agendas of revenue sports athletes in their
practices, team meetings, and game schedules typically
keeps this group isolated from the rest of the
African-American student community, further fragmenting
a fragile population of African-American males on
campus.

Q: Your book highlights some
programs that are helping black men succeed in higher
education. What are some that you think other colleges
should emulate?

A: The nine programs
highlighted are intended to offer a wide variety of
ideas to emulate. I do not expect many schools to find
the funding for another
Meyerhoff Program,but their
summer bridge program, for example, is something other
schools might want to adopt.TheStudent
African American Brotherhood
has chapters on more than 100 campuses, so it offers a
tested organizational structure and a national network
of activities. Bowling Green ’s BMOC program exemplifies
mentoring by African-American faculty and staff and a
special “University 101” section for African-American
males. The Black Men’s Collective at Rutgers brings
together African-American faculty, staff and student
into one organization. The Black Male Rap Session
program at Louisville is loosely designed — one does not
join an organization; one simply shows up for the “rap”
sessions in which he wants to participate.

On the other hand, Arizona
State’s program is formally organized and is operated as
a major initiative of the Multicultural Student Center.
Black Man Think Tanks are one-day, thematic events. The
program at Central State is a student-run, peer tutoring
initiative with little assistance from the
administration. The Collegiate 100 is an example of
collaboration between African American males on the
campus and in the surrounding community. So, I recommend
that readers examine their more critical concerns about
the African-American men on their own campus and select
a program component that might address some specific
needs and conditions.

Soft focus has been used in photography for
almost as long as cameras have been used to take portraits. Softening
the focus helps hide wrinkles, age lines, and skin blemishes, but it can
also be used to give a somewhat dreamy quality to any subject. And it
can help your own photos as well.

This week, let's explore a few ways to add soft
focus to your own pictures.

Start by opening our sample picture in your
favorite image editing program. (I use Corel's Paint Shop Pro X, but, as
always, the techniques can be applied to any image editor.) The first
step is to duplicate the image in a second layer. Layers are a handy way
to make adjustments, since you can vary the opacity of the layer you
make the changes in, thus fine-tuning the overall effect.

To add the layer, chooseLayers, Duplicatefrom
the menu. You won't see any difference in the photo itself, since all
you've done is slapped an identical copy of the image on top of the one
that was already there. If the Layers palette on the right side of the
screen is turned on, you'll see both layers represented there. (To turn
the Layers palette on, chooseView, Palettes, Layers.) The new layer,
called Copy of Background, is the one on top. Here's what you'll see in
Paint Shop Pro X .

Now let's add some soft focus to the photo. The
easiest way to do that is to chooseAdjust, Blur, Gaussian Blur. In the
Gaussian Blur dialog box, set the Radius to about 2.0 and click OK.

Continued in article

Question
What is laddering in the IPO markets?

Definition of Laddering:This practice artificially inflates the value of stocks.
Laddering occurs when underwriters of IPOs obtain commitments from investors
to purchase shares again (after they have begun trading publicly) at a
specified, higher price.
www.securitiesfraudfyi.com/securities_fraud_glossary.html

The financial-services company reached a
memorandum of understanding with investor plaintiffs to settle the
federal case, according to Melvyn Weiss, chairman of the executive
committee of six law firms representing plaintiffs.

A J.P. Morgan spokesman confirmed the agreement
in principle, which is subject to court approval. He said it would have
"no material adverse affect on our financial results," indicating the
bank has likely already set aside funds to cover it.

The lawsuit accused underwriters of improperly
pumping extra air into the stock-market bubble in 1999 and 2000 by
requiring investors who got shares of hot initial public offerings to
buy more shares at higher prices once trading began.

The alleged practices by the 54 underwriter
defendants could have worsened losses of investors who bought at the
higher prices when the bubble burst, the plaintiffs charged. The
practices at issue became known as "laddering."

Freddie Mac said it will pay $410 million to
settle securities class-action and shareholder derivative lawsuits
stemming from its restatement of earnings from 2000 to 2002.

The announcement comes just two days after
Freddie Mac announced a $3.8 million settlement with the Federal
Election Commission to resolve allegations that the government-sponsored
mortgage giant violated campaign-finance laws.

"Today's settlement, like the settlement
announced earlier this week with the Federal Election Commission,
enables this management team to resolve past issues so that we can focus
squarely on meeting our important housing mission, running the business
well and serving the needs of our customers," said Richard Syron,
Freddie Mac's chief executive.

The $410 million payment will go into a fund
that will repay several Ohio pension funds and other investors who
purchased Freddie Mac stock between July 15, 1999, and Nov. 20, 2003.

Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro, who negotiated
the settlement with Freddie Mac, alleged that Freddie "misrepresented
its financial condition during that period."

Freddie Mac said, "the settlement is...based on
corporate-governance reforms instituted by the company under its current
management." It added that it didn't admit wrongdoing. Freddie Mac
didn't admit wrongdoing in the Federal Election Commission case either.

Freddie Mac expects the settlement to lower its
first-quarter 2005 net income by $220 million after taxes.

We've all heard about the woman who won
millions in a lawsuit after spilling hot coffee on herself. But now
there's a new contender for the title of most outrageous jury award.
Last week a court in Texas demanded $27.5 million in damages for a woman
of Iranian descent who claimed she was racially profiled during an
altercation with Southwest Airlines flight attendants.

Samantha Carrington of Santa Barbara,
California, alleges that a Southwest Airlines employee said Ms.
Carrington reminded her of a "terrorist" during the 2003 incident, which
resulted in her detention in El Paso and subsequent arrest. Southwest,
meanwhile, accuses Ms. Carrington of assaulting a flight attendant and
interfering with the crew.

We can't know for sure who's telling the truth
here. But we do know that passengers aren't generally detained for
frivolous reasons, and that flight crews need to be able to do their job
without fear of frivolous claims. Even if Ms. Carrington was
ill-treated, the most she deserved was some free tickets. Only in
America could she hit the tort jackpot. What's next? A profiling suit
from Zacarias Moussaoui?

Stanford University: Only the Fertile Need ApplyUnfortunately, the policy itself —
which provides accommodation in the form of paid leave,
extension of deadlines and reduced workload to graduate
students “anticipating or experiencing a birth” — sends an
entirely different message.While the phrase “anticipating or
experiencing a birth” seems expansive enough to cover
“anticipating” the birth of an adoptive child, that is not
Stanford’s intention. Associate Dean for Graduate Policy
Gail Mahood was brutally frank on this point: “The policy
does not apply to women who adopt children.… Women can
always put off adopting,” she told a reporter.Apparently
Stanford prefers grad students who create families “the old
fashioned way,” leaving others to sink or swim without
institutional support. So much for the message of
inclusiveness and diversity! In creating this restrictive
policy, Stanford seems to have lost sight of its original
goal, confused means and ends, and conflated biology
(childbirth) with social issues (family formation).
"Only the Fertile Need Apply," by Charlotte Fishman,
Inside Higher Ed, April 20, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/04/20/fishman

Man Delivers Pizzas, Corpses in Same VehicleA pizza deliveryman stopped by police told officers
that he was delivering pizzas in the same station wagon he used to ferry
bodies (on a stretcher) for a mortuary
transport service . . . Police said Bethel told them that although he was
delivering pizzas for a major pizza chain, he also "transports deceased
bodies in the same vehicle." The car was impounded and Bethel was cited for
driving with a suspended or revoked license and without a certificate of
inspection.
"Man Delivers Pizzas, Corpses In Same Vehicle," Cincinnati Channel 5,
April 30, 2006 ---
http://www.channelcincinnati.com/food/9064986/detail.html
Jensen Comment
His main problem was keeping some delivery items hot and other delivery
items cold.

World's Smallest Political Quiz

April 19, 2006 message from Auntie Bev

You might enjoy this ... an online political
quiz. It takes less than a minute, but it will help you look at politics
in a whole new way. It's the World's Smallest Political Quiz at:

You'll be asked just 10 questions, and then it
instantly tells you where you stand politically. It shows your position
as a red dot on a "political map" so you'll see exactly where you score.

The most interesting thing about the Quiz is
that it goes beyond the Democrat, Republican, Independent. The Quiz has
gotten a lot of praise. The Washington Post said it has "gained respect
as a valid measure of a person's political leanings." The Fraser
Institute said it's "a fast, fun, and accurate assessment of a person's
overall political views." Suite University said it is the "most concise
and accurate political quiz out there."

It was twice the fun for members of the White
House Correspondents' Association and guests Saturday night when
President Bush and a look-alike, sound-alike sidekick poked fun at the
president and fellow politicians.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I feel chipper tonight.
I survived the White House shake-up," the president said.

But impersonator Steve Bridges stole many of
the best lines. Vice President Dick Cheney and his hunting accident were
targets of his humor on a couple of occasions.

"Speaking of suspects, where is the great white
hunter?" Bridges said, later adding, "He shot the only trial lawyer in
the country who supports me."

Bush continued a tradition begun by President
Coolidge in attending the correspondents' dinner.

He invited Bridges to play his double. The
president talked to the press in polite, friendly terms. Bridges told
them what the president was really thinking.

Bridges opened like this: "The media really
ticks me off — the way they try to embarrass me by not editing what I
say. Well, let's get things going, or I'll never get to bed."

"I'm absolutely delighted to be here, as is
(wife) Laura," Bush replied.

"She's hot," Bridges quipped.

The featured entertainer was Stephen Colbert,
whose Comedy Central show "The Colbert Report" often lampoons the
Washington establishment.

"I believe that the government that governs
best is a government that governs least, and by these standards we have
set up a fabulous government in Iraq," Colbert said in a typical zinger.

He also paid mock tribute to Bush as a man who
"believes Wednesday what he believed Monday, despite what happened
Tuesday."

Yet it's the Who's Who of power and celebrity
in the audience — invited by media organizations to their dinner tables
— that draws much of the attention.

Continued in article

Forwarded by Paula

Oldies but goodies! Airline cabin announcements

All too rarely, airline attendants make an effort to make the in flight
"safety lecture" and announcements a bit more entertaining. Here are some
real examples that have been heard or reported:

1. On a Southwest flight (SW has no assigned seating, you just sit where
you want) passengers were apparently having a hard time choosing, when a
flight attendant announced, "People, people we're not picking out furniture
here, find a seat and get in it!"

2. On a Continental Flight with a very "senior" flight attendant crew,
the pilot said, "Ladies and gentlemen, we've reached cruising altitude and
will be turning down the cabin lights. This is for your comfort and to
enhance the appearance of your flight attendants."

3. On landing, the stewardess said, "Please be sure to take all of your
belongings. If you're going to leave anything, please make sure it's
something we'd like to have."

4. "There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there are only 4 ways
out of this airplane"

5. "Thank you for flying Delta Business Express. We hope you enjoyed
giving us the business as much as we enjoyed taking you for a ride."

6. As the plane landed and was coming to a stop at Ronald Reagan, a lone
voice came over the loudspeaker: "Whoa, big fella. WHOA!"

7. After a particularly rough landing during thunderstorms in Memphis, a
flight attendant on a Northwest flight announced, "Please take care when
opening the overhead compartments because, after a landing like that, sure
as hell everything has shifted."

8. From a Southwest Airlines employee: "Welcome aboard Southwest Flight
245 to Tampa. To operate your seat belt, insert the metal tab into the
buckle, and pull tight. It works just like every other seat belt; and, if
you don't know how to operate one, you probably shouldn't be out in public
unsupervised."

9. "In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, masks will descend
from the ceiling. Stop screaming, grab the mask, and pull it over your face.
If you have a small child traveling with you, secure your mask before
assisting with theirs. If you are traveling with more than one small child,
pick your favorite."

10. "Weather at our destination is 50 degrees with some broken clouds,
but we'll try to have them fixed before we arrive. Thank you, and remember,
nobody loves you, or your money, more than Southwest Airlines."

11. "Your seat cushions can be used for flotation; and, in the event of
an emergency water landing, please paddle to shore and take them with our
compliments."

12. "As you exit the plane, make sure to gather all of your belongings.
Anything left behind will be distributed evenly among the flight attendants.
Please do not leave children or spouses."

13. And from the pilot during his welcome message: "Delta Airlines is
pleased to have some of the best flight attendants in the industry.
Unfortunately, none of them are on this flight!"

14. Heard on Southwest Airlines just after a very hard landing in Salt
Lake City the flight attendant came on the intercom and said, "That was
quite a bump, and I know what y'all are thinking. I'm here to tell you it
wasn't the airline's fault, it wasn't the pilot's fault, it wasn't the
flight attendant's fault, it was the asphalt."

15. Overheard on an American Airlines flight into Amarillo, Texas, on a
particularly windy and bumpy day. During the final approach, the Captain was
really having to fight it. After an extremely hard landing, the Flight
Attendant said, "Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Amarillo. Please remain in
your seats with your seat belts fastened while the Captain taxis what's left
of our airplane to the gate!"

16. Another flight attendant's comment on a less than perfect landing:
"We ask you to please remain seated as Captain Kangaroo bounces us to the
terminal."

17. An airline pilot wrote that on this particular flight he had!
hammered his ship into the runway really hard. The airline had a policy
which required the first officer to stand at the door while the Passengers
exited, smile, and give them a "Thanks for flying our airline." He said
that, in light of his bad landing, he had a hard time looking the passengers
in the eye, thinking that someone would have a smart comment. Finally
everyone had gotten off except for a little old lady walking with a cane.
She said, "Sir, do you mind if I ask you a question?" "Why, no, Ma'am," said
the pilot. "What is it?" The little old lady said, "Did we land, or were we
shot down?"

18. After a real crusher of a landing in Phoenix, the attendantcame on
with, "Ladies and Gentlemen, please remain in your seats until Capt. Crash
and the Crew have brought the aircraft to a screeching halt against the
gate. And, once the tire smoke has cleared and the warning bells are
silenced, we'll open the door and you can pick your way through the wreckage
to the terminal."

19. Part of a flight attendant's arrival announcement: "We'd like to
thank you folks for flying with us today. And, the next time you get the
insane urge to go blasting through the skies in a pressurized metal tube, we
hope you'll think of US Airways."

20. Heard on a Southwest Airline flight. "Ladies and gentlemen, if you
wish to smoke, the smoking section on this airplane is on the wing and if
you can light 'em, you can smoke 'em."

21. A plane was taking off from Kennedy Airport. After it reached a
comfortable cruising altitude, the captain made an announcement over the
intercom, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain peaking. Welcome to
Flight Number 293, nonstop from New York to Los Angeles. The weather ahead
is good and, therefore, we should have a smooth and uneventful flight. Now
sit back and relax... OH, MY GOD!" Silence followed, and after a few
minutes, the captain came back on the intercom and said, "Ladies and
Gentlemen, I am so sorry if I scared you earlier. While I was talking to
you, the flight attendant accidentally spilled a cup of hot coffee in my
lap. You should see the front of my pants!" A passenger in Coach yelled,
"That's nothing. You should see the back of mine."